It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so...
In 1975 the Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh . . . For the dialogue between Kavanaugh and Mother Teresa, see Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust. An account of Mother Teresa’s journey in a collection of...
If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God’s terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precis...
I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.
I am not trying to offer a cheap apologetic for the resurrection of Christ; accepting the resurrection of Christ is truly a matter of faith.
Judging by how the Bible actually behaves—God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for...
With all due respect to Israel’s primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I’m more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into i...
Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.
What drove the Bible’s storytellers to recall the past the way they did was the quest to experience God in the present, a sometimes volatile and catastrophic present. What makes the Bible God’s Word i...
We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don’t, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren’t really following. Just sort of following. Standing around. [Oh God, what...
These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.
The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith. Even though the Bible (at least in some form) has been ever present since the beginning of Christianity, it’s not...
Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.
One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our mode...
Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in heaven are metaphors—the use of common language to grasp the uncommon, a reality too deep and thick for conventi...
It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was...
Faith like this does not come easily for many of us, and often it can only emerge at the tail end of difficult and trying experiences. For it is in those moments that we come to realize how little we...
Doubt is God’s way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.
Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places—places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it—patiently,...
Biblical writers living in different times and places who wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances have modeled for us the centrality of wisdom for the life of faith. To rethink t...