Everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.
Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places?
What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically...
We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.
This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.
Third, it is our responsibility to be extremely careful about making negative, decisive,
The way of Jesus is a journey, not a destination.
The violence isn’t that surprising; what’s surprising is that among all that violence are new ideas about serving and blessing and nonviolence. Here’s what I mean: Do you find it primitive and barbari...
The intellect has a way of building a fence around the heart, cutting us off from what we know to be true in a way that is hard to prove according to the categories in which proof matters.
The Bible is not an argument. It is a record of human experience. The point is not to prove that it’s the word of God or it’s inspired or it’s whatever the current word is that people are using. The p...
The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine. People at that time believed the gods were with them when they went to war and killed everyone in the village. W...
So when we talk about God we’re using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.
Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.
One of the great theologians of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: When everything gets answered, it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.21
Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem t...
It's important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one: who you AREN'T isn't interesting.
If you feel stuck in your life, like it’s passing you by, like there’s something way better for you somewhere out there and you’re missing it, try this—try throwing yourself into the small things and...
If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we...
If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions...
But this lawyer, he can’t even answer Jesus’s question by saying the name. He simply replies the one . . . That’s your neighbor. That’s who you’re called to love. That’s where the eternal life is foun...