The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.
One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what w...
Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no them; there is only us.
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...
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...
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.
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 tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.
The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we’re not shocked by the Beatitudes, it’s only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality—and being sentimental about Jesus i...
Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.
It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.
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...
Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.
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...
The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.
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...
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...
The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit … because of how it feels.
The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes...
The problem with our change the world rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance—things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to li...