And in 1513, the Spanish government created a kind of Miranda rights–style document that was to be read (in Spanish—incomprehensible to the indigenous peoples!) to those about to be conquered. It was...
The kind of person who wants to participate in the healing of the world is very different from the kind of person who wants to leave this world behind so she can go to a better one.
There is a difference — subtle but very significant — between having faith in my faith (i.e., faith in my intellectual concepts about God — another way of saying leaning on my own understanding) and h...
The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and,...
The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way...
Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.
If I could seriously ponder ending my life, then I can do anything. I can change anything in my life. So instead of ending my life altogether, I’ll end my life as I’ve been living it and start a new k...
When theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called liberation theologians, but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled...
We might say that two thousand years ago, Jesus inserted into the human imagination a radical new vision of God—nondominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self-giving. That vision was so radic...
Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through.
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Such a possibility raises a question: if one dares to let one’s traditional and inherited Christian understanding of God be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christ...
Some people--and I pray I will be one of them--never forget what it was like, which enables them to mentor people of any age.
Postmoderns are not less interested in religion than ever before. Indeed, they are exploring new religious experiences like never before. The church has simply given them a less interesting religion t...
Motivated thus by their beliefs in God and their lust for gold—as dangerous a cocktail today as then—the Spanish Christians ravaged Latin America, as did their Portuguese counterparts. Bartolomé concl...
The more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus. That’s certainly true whe...
[Spiritual] Practices are not for know-it-alls. Practices are for those who feel the need for change, growth, development, learning. Practices are for disciples.
We hate those times of weakness, but I can see why life would be engineered to bring us to them; without them, we might never learn what faith is at all. Someone has said that you never know if your f...
Through study we welcome the light of God into our minds.
So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.