When I listened to public prayers in evangelical churches, I heard people telling God what to do, combined with thinly veiled hints on how others should behave. When
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, 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.
We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate...
Theologian Hart goes on to note a secret irony hidden in the arguments of the skeptics: They would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral univers...
The test of observance of Christ's teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the e...
The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.
The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward.
The West too may find that prosperity and self-indulgence are not sufficient to satisfy human needs.
That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus’ word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human fa...
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...
Shouldn’t we be presenting an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply mimicking it? What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and...
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...
Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.
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...
Los seres humanos crecemos al luchar, trabajar y extendernos; en cierto sentido, la naturaleza humana tiene más necesidad de problemas que de soluciones.
Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people’s rules seem excessively strict.
La fidelidad implica aprender a confiar que, más allá del perímetro de la oscuridad, Dios aún reina y no nos ha abandonado, no importa lo que parezca.