In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.
God doesn’t give in order to acquire. God loves without self-seeking; that’s at the heart of who God is. God gives for the benefit of others.
Two false images of God are particularly irresistible to many of us – mostly unconsciously. The first I’ll designate as God the negotiator and the other, God the Santa Claus. Though we have fashioned...
Some theologians claim that all God’s desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and to maintain God’s own glory. On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being...
G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next.
The central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and ov...
Through my memory of the Passion, God can purify my memory of wrongs suffered because my identity stems neither from the wrongdoing done to me, which would require the perpetual accusation of my wrong...
The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enem...
When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God’s ways to our ways and God’s thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and de...
To live in sync with who we truly are means to recognize that we are dependent on God for our very breath and are graced with many good things; it means to be grateful to the giver and attentive to th...
Notice that, in making ourselves available, we are not doing God any favors. We give ourselves for God’s use to benefit creation, not to benefit God.
If it is true that the dual command of love is the common ground of the two faiths, the consequences are momentous. We no longer have to say, The deeper your faith, the more you will be at odds with o...
For those familiar with the early history of the Christian church—and for careful observers of young and vibrant Christian communities in the non-Western world—there is something odd about the present...
The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them (Moltma...
The cure against Christian violence is not less of the Christian faith, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more of the Christian faith. I don’t mean, of course, that the cure against violence lies i...
She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing...