The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of power, which are rules of ungrace
The atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was once asked what made him so negative toward Christians. He replied, I would believe in their salvation if they looked a little more like people who ha...
Suffering can never ultimately be meaningless, because God has shared it.
Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
Prosperity may dilute prayer too. In my travels I have noticed that Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The
Perhaps the reason politics has proved such a snare for the church is that power rarely coexists with love. People in power draw up lists of friends and enemies, then reward their friends and punish t...
Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.
Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they...
Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about — like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.
La idea central en la mayor parte del Antiguo Testamento podría ser llamada «la idea de la soledad de Dios». — G. K. Chesterton
If we cannot detect God's presence in the world, it may be that we have been looking in the wrong places.
If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!
I was quick to pounce on his moral flaws and slow to recognize my own blind sin. But because he stayed faithful, by offering his body as a target but never as a weapon, he broke through my moral callu...
I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with...
I have written about the toxic church I grew up in: a legalistic, angry, racist church in the South. I joke about being in recovery from that church, learning along the way that much presented as abso...
I am forced to reexamine. Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular: There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible—until we manage to get so...
How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.
God shattered the inexorable law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer, crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition...
From Jesus I learn that God is on the side of the sufferer.
Even in post-Christian societies the gospel will continue to do its subversive work. Jesus used small things to describe his kingdom: a sprinkling of yeast that causes the whole loaf to rise, a pinch...