We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and...
The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must...
Andrew Perriman at P.OST (postnost.net).
The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition.
The Bible looks the way it does because God lets his children tell the story, so to speak. Children see the world from their limited gaze. A second grader might give a class presentation on what mom d...
Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with sp...
God wants us dead. Or better: God wants us to get used to the need to die, not once, but as a pattern for our lives.
Getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.
Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude.
The Bible, just as it is, still works. Don’t try to explain it. Just accept it. That won’t make you a mindless zombie. It just means you are accepting your own human limitations and acknowledging by f...
To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeyto...
Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a pale blue dot . . . The Pale Blue Dot is a moving soliloquy by Carl Sagan in his 1980 television series Cosmos. The remake of this series, which aired in 20...
When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?
These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persiste...
The Bible looks the way it does because God lets his children tell the story, so to speak.
In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.
Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army,...
Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.
The broader we cast our net, the deeper we wind up owning our own thoughts.