I knew Catholics existed, with their saints and candles and rosaries, and all their other exotic ways of being wrong.
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.
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend t...
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 the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was, This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do a...
And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.
Again and again Jesus had said they should preach forgiveness of sins in his name. Maybe Judas was destined to betray Jesus. Maybe it couldn’t have gone down in any other way than it did. But maybe Ju...
What if God’s Word is so much more powerful than our ability to become worthy of God? I mean, not for nothing, but if God can create the universe by speaking it into existence, then I think God can...
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...
Mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. W...
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.
Which is exactly why our demons try to keep us from people who remind us how loved we are. Our demons want nothing to do with the love of God in Christ Jesus because it threatens to obliterate them,...
When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on th...
Unitarians just don't talk much about our need for God's grave. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the...
Too often, the diagram that religion draws up for explaining sex takes the snake's-eye view—it names only the physics of fear, threat, and control, but none of the magic. Likewise, media and advertisi...
New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve...
In the end, the only real love in the world is found when you let yourself be truly known.
In the Jesus business, community is always a part of healing. Even though community is never perfect.
If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier.
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.