By inner attitude and outward action, we must defile money's sacred character. Money is too high on our list of values. As Thomas Merton observed, "The true 'law' of our day is the law of wealth and material power." For Christians, this giving of high priority to...
Perhaps the most radical act of resistance in the face of adversity is to live joyfully.
Those people are not real mourners who say, "Sure, the world's in a mess, and I guess maybe I'm a bit guilty like everybody else, but what can I do about it?" What they're really saying is that they are not concerned enough about themselves or the world to look for...
Who stands fast? Only the person whose final standard is not his or her reason, principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God--the...
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting...
Public good doesn't automatically follow from private virtue. A person's moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what's legal more moral, to speak truth to power,...
Rules at best are signposts, never hitching posts. Personally, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a Christian rule. There are probably only acts that are more or less Christian depending on the motives prompting them. But if we say, "Down with rules," we must at...
For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience. Since, then, we cannot adequately speak of obedience as the consequence of faith, and since we must never forget the indissoluble unity of the two, we...
People are hungry for love. Are we aware of that? Do we know that? Do we see that? Do we have eyes to see? Quite often we look but we don't see. We are all just passing through this world. We need to open our eyes and see. Since we cannot see Christ, we cannot express...
If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not...