The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human pol...
The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit … because of how it feels.
The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.
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.
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...
What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God’s love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the v...
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...
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...
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...
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...
When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Pe...
Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information.
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.
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...
This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and af...
The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.
Not long ago I was in Istanbul, Turkey. While there I toured the Topkapi Palace—the former royal palace of the Ottoman sultans and center of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many artifacts collected thro...
It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.
For people who are poor at being spiritual (which is most people), this announcement really is good news. But do you see how counterintuitive this is? The kingdom of God is coming on earth, and who wo...
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