Sadly, Jesus’ followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy pe...
Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus’ love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace.
Our need to give is every bit as desperate as the poor’s need to receive.
Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.
One more, final question came from the audience on my last night in Newtown, and it was the one I most did not want to hear: Will God protect my child?I stayed silent for what seemed like minutes. Mor...
One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the c...
One bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As...
No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.
Maybe God isn’t trying to tell us anything specific each time we hurt. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of our planet, and Christians are not exempt.
Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God's law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God's grace is so great that we do not have to.
It takes great effort, and considerable faith, to keep the Big Picture in mind. In some ways it makes me feel utterly insignificant, in some ways eternally significant
In a sense, Job must replay the original test of the garden of Eden, with the bar raised higher. Living in paradise, Adam and Eve faced a best-case scenario for trusting God, who asked so little of th...
If it’s not setting you free and enlarging life, then it’s not Jesus’ message. If it doesn’t sound like good news, it’s not the gospel.
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.
Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.
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.
If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way...
When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person.
When I pray, coincidences happen, said Archbishop William Temple; when I don’t, they don’t.