As Paul said, “We see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12 KJV). If we remember that, we might be able to avoid turning our fallible interpretations into infallible declarations of God’s truth. And yet we will continue to seek God’s truth, in the Bible and beyond....
If Christmas is about being happy, jolly, and untroubled and therefore able to celebrate, few can participate. But Advent is about broken people in a broken world, yearning for a long-promised redemption.
Deepening our sensitivity to the historical nature of Christian tradition and the mediating role of Christian leaders can help us think much more clearly about our realities and responsibilities today. We can situate ourselves within the flow of Christian history,...
The world is growing more integrated, not less. Studying moral leadership is a way forward in a world where earnest people of faith have no choice but to speak to each other, not just about each other. from Moral Leadership for a Divided Age
Jesus made it clear that the moral demands of the faith he taught centered on love, justice, and mercy. I believe that God is, here as everywhere, nudging Christians toward love—love for the Creator, love for other people, love for self, love for the world God has...
I believe that God made the world, set humans in responsibility over it, and chooses to communicate to us the nature of moral goodness and a rightly ordered world — even if sometimes it seems a distant dream. from After Evangelicalism
The world is complex and facing staggering problems. It needs Christians who are up to the task of making a constructive contribution, intellectually ready for the challenges that humanity faces, deeply motivated to love God and neighbor with all our minds. from After...
Love is the destination, the telos, the goal—but we learn that we never arrive. We drive in the direction of love, but our destination keeps receding beyond the horizon. Yet we dare not set our course for any other destination. from Introducing Christian Ethics
Sometimes the people who are most endangered by their own misbegotten rational capacities are Christians who have studied a whole lot of Bible and theology and think of themselves as merely applying the truths they have learned.
For Jesus, there can be no sacred violence. There can only be sacred nonviolence. “Nonviolence” is not an adequate term, because it does not quite capture the creative, dynamic, surprising, transforming initiatives that Jesus commands.