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...
Whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.
Looking for fights—encouraging and even creating controversy thinking that God wills it—is pathological.
In Solitude; also James Martin’s introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trus...
Don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity...
You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress a...
Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel’s countertestimony . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel’s main storyline, comes fro...
Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.
The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust...
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...
The Bible is an ancient book and we shouldn’t be surprised to see it act like one. So seeing God portrayed as a violent, tribal warrior is not how God is but how he was understood to be by the ancient...
That kind of Bible works, because that is our story, too. The Bible partners with us (so to speak), modeling for us our walk with God in discovering greater depth and maturity on our journey of faith,...
Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it’s not meant to be, isn’t a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It’s act...
So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.
Revering the Bible and handling it creatively might sound like a contradiction to us, but it wasn’t to ancient Jews. To understand why, and therefore to understand Jesus, we need to back up for just a...
Rather than simply protecting the past, our faith communities have a sacred responsibility to protect the future by actively and intentionally creating a culture of trust in God, in order to deliver t...
Rather than defining faithfulness as absolute conformity to authority and tribal identity, a trust-centered faith will value in others the search for true human authenticity that may take them away fr...
Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise—those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have ea...
Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the co...
Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel’s story.