According to Gallup polls, more Americans will pray this week than will exercise, drive a car, have sex, or go to work. Nine in ten of us pray regularly, and three out of four claim to pray every day....
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 human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.
A Franciscan Benediction
The healthiest body is the one that feels the pain of its weakest parts. In
Will Christians turn once again toward an approach that imposes its will on the rest of society? By doing so we would betray our founder, who resisted a temptation to authority over all the kingdoms o...
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
The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: The Maker of all things loves and wants me. Christians still believe in that truth.
Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.
In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how 'pure' you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: God gets his family back. From the firs...
I have marveled at, and sometimes openly questioned, the self-restraint God has shown throughout history, allowing the Genghis Khans and the Hitlers and the Stalins to have their way. But nothing - no...
I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a...
Everyone is entitled to my opinion.
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...
C. S. Lewis introduced the phrase pain, the megaphone of God. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains, he said; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world...
As a counterbalance to the list of seven deadly sins, the church in the Middle Ages came up with a list of seven works of mercy: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house...
A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.
A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
Frankly, I have seen even more graceless, not to say scurrilous, responses to Barack Obama from Christians. The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the ru...