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...
Diversity in no way implies chaos or error.
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...
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.
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.
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...
Getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.
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...
When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?
In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.
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...
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...
Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.
The Bible looks the way it does because God lets his children tell the story, so to speak.
I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition . . . Such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Robert Bly (Iron John), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements...
Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.
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...
N. T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision or What Paul Really Said.
Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God’s Word requires a literal reading.
Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see t...
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