The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness.
The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in...
The adjective so often coupled with mercy is the word tender, but God’s mercy is not tender; this mercy is a blunt instrument. Mercy doesn’t wrap a warm, limp blanket around offenders. God’s mercy is...
The Jesus whom God sent to claim and save us is what keeps me in Christianity, despite a hundred reasons to pack up and leave.
Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for.
Sometimes help comes from unexpected places.
Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself.
Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside, blessing all the accidental saints in this world, especially those who that world — like o...
Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all th...
Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I'd expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I'd moved on from, to see...
Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I asked my congregation. There was passion in their replies, and none of it had to do with how much they appreciate their preacher being such an amazing role model for t...
I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.
I knew Catholics existed, with their saints and candles and rosaries, and all their other exotic ways of being wrong.
I don’t think her image is everywhere because she is a reminder to be obedient, and I don’t think it has to do with social revolution. Images of Mary remind us of God’s favor. Mary is what it looks...
I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it’s my job to change people so they fit or it’s my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it’s misguided b...
God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the plan...
Church is messed up. I know that. People, including me, have been hurt by it. But as my United Church of Christ pastor friend Heather says, Church isn’t perfect. It’s practice. Among God’s people, th...
Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance—a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts—which leads to possibilities we never considered. To lo...
But at the time I didn’t know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents’ church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now...