Before conversion, we tend to think that God is out there. After transformation, God is not out there and we don’t look at reality. We look from reality. We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is...
The reality of human society and acquisitiveness is such that the poor will always tend to be exploited; a society built on the competitive principle means that in order for there to be a winner, there must be a greater number of losers. In such a society, where law...
If it [our framing story] tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little...
Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.
As the characters in the story maintain a safe distance from Jesus, speculating among themselves about this new powerful teacher, readers of Mark are invited to follow Jesus into a whole new world, says New Testament scholar Brian Blount, into "Mark's world of Jesus...
To read the gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said. We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange deeds and words. He intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of the...
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...
I think Jesus would have said, "It's not about me." During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as "Good Teacher," Jesus responded with, "Why do you call me good? No one is good...
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life in between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceeds...
When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), he is personifying mammon as a rival god. In saying this, Jesus is making it unmistakably...