Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him d...
I grew up with the strong impression that a person became spiritual by attending to these gray-area rules. For the life of me, I could not figure out much difference between the dispensations of Law a...
God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.
For Jesus, the person was more important than any category or label.
As the priest in Harold Frederic’s novel The Damnation of Theron Ware cynically concludes, There must always be a church. If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first...
A Franciscan Benediction
¿Hay siempre fe cuando se produce un gran número de milagros?
The redemptive way goes through pain, not around it.
Over time Christians learned that the faith grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.
Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God’s secret will; rather, he healed them.
My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That
In a letter to his brother, C. S. Lewis mentioned that he prayed every night for the people he was most tempted to hate, with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini heading the list. In another letter he wrote...
I know of only two alternatives to hypocrisy: perfection or honesty.
I go to church as an expression of my need for God and for God's family.
I get mailings from Amnesty International, and as I look at their photos of men and women who have been beaten and cattle-prodded and jabbed and spit on and electrocuted, I ask myself, What kind of hu...
Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.
Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom...
Dorothy Day used to say that we should live in such a way that our lives wouldn’t make much sense if the gospel were not true.
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
Can we live now as if God is loving, gracious, merciful, and all-powerful, even while the blinders of time are obscuring our vision? The