Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.
Bear one another’s burdens, the Bible says. It is a lesson about pain that we all can agree on. Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But...
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 Jewish rabbi put it, A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, I am but dust and ashes.' On the other, For my sake was the world created.' And he should use each...
As I have said, the Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pain. It rarely, or ambiguously, answers the backward-looking question Why? Instead, it raises the very differen...
As Dennis Covington has written, Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. 7-20
Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that the path toward cure involves more than a quick-fix solution based on increased knowledge. In fact, it involves a change that seems more theological than...
According to Barna surveys, 61 percent of today’s youth had been churched at one point during their teen years but are now spiritually disengaged.
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?
[...]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 would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?
We, Jesus’ followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God’s will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.
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.