On the first Palm Sunday. It happened a hundred and fifty years ago in America. It continues to happen today. If we think Jesus shares and endorses our disdain and enmity for our enemies, we don’t kno...
I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don’t care. I’ve gr...
Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.
Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.
Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information.
Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.
Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.
Feeling intimidated by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentalism takes a scientific approach to the Bible—which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture. The Bible is not interested in g...
We eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we mig...
Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
Here in the second beatitude, Jesus is making an important announcement to those who, instead of finding a means of avoiding personal pain and shared sorrow, have allowed themselves to be sculpted by...
American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans—the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower—have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean...
I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.
If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Sa...
If what we mean by Jesus saves the world gets reduced to saved people go to heaven when they die, then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not...
The church sacrifices the beauty of Christianity when it chooses the political form over the cruciform. Reaching for the ring of power distorts our beauty.
It was Jesus’s ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn’t very dangerous. It’s been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth...
This—when we feel hurt, threatened, or angered by a person, people-group, opinion, or situation, we instinctively look through the lens of self-defense. It’s like looking at something through the sigh...
It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, Blessed are you who are poor—period. (Luke 6:20) In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of in sp...
Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and...
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