But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving stren’th we didn’t know we had.
Be careful, warned Nietzsche, lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon. I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almos...
As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.
As Dorothy Day put it, I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as the sum of the world’s suffering, an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wo...
A curious law of reversal seems to be at work in the Gospels: faith appears where least expected and falters where it should be thriving.
When I turn from church history and examine myself, I find that I too am vulnerable to the Temptation. I lack the willpower to resist shortcut solutions to human needs. I lack the patience to allow Go...
The issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree. We Christians are called to use the weapons of grace, which means treating even our oppone...
The New Testament holds up the model of a church whose activities exist primarily for the sake of outsiders. What keeps us from becoming the church God had in mind?
Senseless. I prefer the word buzzed, following the brain/amplifier analogy.
Recall Gandhi’s remark that if you take the principle an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world will go blind and toothless.
Culture? As Lesslie Newbigin poses the question, Can one who goes the way of the Cross sit in the seat of Pilate when it falls vacant?
[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.
[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?
Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or...
What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse
We truly live only one day at a time. It doesn’t really help to worry about the future, which we can’t control, or the past, which we can’t change.
We feel pain as an outrage; Jesus did too, which is why he performed miracles of healing. In Gethsemane, he did not pray, Thank you for this opportunity to suffer, but rather pled desperately for an e...
We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.
True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die.