There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics...
Standing in a large Minnesotan church hall I tried to muster up the interest and stamina it takes to greet each person with the honor he or she deserves. This always feels like a battle between my mis...
Sometimes God needs some stuff done, even though I can be a real asshole. There is absolutely no justice in the fact that Larry loved me and that church. But if I got what I deserved in this life, I'...
So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the...
Religion can be a way to hide, numb, or even entertain ourselves like a spiritual Candy Crush, either through the comforting blandness and predictability of mainline Protestantism or through the tempo...
I’m not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down.
It is next to impossible in isolation to manufacture the beautiful, radical grace that flows from the heart of God to God’s broken and blessed humanity. As
In the end, the only real love in the world is found when you let yourself be truly known.
I was slightly irritated to be reminded of Jesus’ message by a new Christian when what I rather would’ve done was rant about the shit that was making me hate people.
Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no right or perfect way to be. We learn from our mistakes; we extend grace to others and ourselves.
Chloe kept drawing and hiding and peeking out to look at my tattoos again. Did those hurt? she asked, which was right around the time I noticed the shiny thin lines on her arms. I thought to myself.
But we’ve lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning.
Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnera...
Because sometimes the most holy thing we can say is: No. Not on my watch.
As I wrote in I, like any good middle-class mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's...
And to say Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are...
And then I remember: it doesn’t matter. The fact that I sometimes don’t get it is my shit, and I should not confuse my shit with my job. My job is to just love my parishioners. And I do. Not perfectly...
And anyway, it has been my experience that what makes us the saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.
And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.
We should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should...