The key is this: the main benefit of giving is in its effect on the giver. Yes, people in Africa and India need my financial help, as the fund-raising appeals urgently remind me. But in truth my need...
Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.7-19 He lists hope at the end, instead of where I would normally expect it, at the beginning, as the fuel that keeps a per...
Stanley Hauerwas, named America’s best theologian by Time magazine, summed up the problem: I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, tho...
Sometimes God seemed as close as his wife or children. Sometimes he had no sense of God's presence, no faith to lean on. God is wild, you know, he wrote. We're not in charge.
Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outsi...
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; th...
Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.
Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.
Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self...
It makes a huge difference whether I treat a nonbeliever as someone who is wrong rather than as someone who is on the way but lost.
How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?
How differently would the world view Christians if we focused on our own failings rather than on society’s? As I read the New Testament I am struck by how little attention it gives to the faults of th...
God had hallowed creation by separating the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean. Jesus did not cancel out the hallowing principle, rather he changed its source. We ourselves can be age...
For us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that la...
Democracy requires us to recognize others’ rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person’s ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coe...
Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, h...
Church is a place where I can say, unashamedly, I don't need to sin. I need another sinner.
Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping t...
Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?
Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ord...