What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is on tap
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 need a renewed awareness of death, yes. But we need far more. We need a faith, in the midst of our groaning, that death is not the last word, but the next to last. What is mortal will be swallowed...
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...
Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its li...
The suffering person faces choices. She can recoil in anger and despair against God. Or she can accept the trial as an opportunity for joy. I do not mean to imply that God loves one type of sufferer a...
The question {WHY}, though, never goes away-- not for me, not for anybody. We keep groping toward light while living in darkness.
The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.
The Quakers have a saying: An enemy is one whose story we have not heard. To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view...
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.
Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.
Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job,...
People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.
Los seres humanos crecemos al luchar, trabajar y extendernos; en cierto sentido, la naturaleza humana tiene más necesidad de problemas que de soluciones.
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.
Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Chr...
Jesus’ story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day’s wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is...
Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders fr...
Jesus honored the dignity of people, whether he agreed with them or not. He would not found his kingdom on the basis of race or class or other such divisions.