When you take the Way of Jesus seriously, you encounter resistance. Jesus calls us to love our enemies, but society kills our enemies. Jesus calls us to Jubilee, but ours is a nation of debt. Jesus calls us to befriend the ostracized, but ours is a society of...
The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but...
You may have been reminded of another popular book while reflecting on the vision of God's open-ended, creative, and lively adventure and on your own role as a partner with God in healing the world. Many persons have found a greater sense of meaning through reading...
Anyway, most of the openhearted wanderers I’ve encountered are looking not for a bulletproof belief system but for a community of friends, not for a spiritual encyclopedia that contains every answer but for a gathering of loved ones in which they can ask the hard...
For any of us feeling longing in Advent: Even though Jesus’ experience in the wilderness wasn’t easy—he fasted for forty days and forty nights and was confronted by the devil—the devil was not the only one he encountered there. The spirit sent Jesus into the...
On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out...
At the heart of each of us is a compelling hunger for ways to live and be in relationship that are genuine. Too often we choose ways that enslave rather than free us, and so it is with churches as well. What the world longs for are people and churches who have found...
Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the one they hate. They confirm him in all his darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all his most burning...
Christians, we have maintained, are those who through confrontation with death are given new freedom from the sting of death and so a new freedom for voluntary service to others. Surely if this claim has any truth in it, then it is not our own suffering but the...
Everyone around you; the people you share the grocery store line with, pass in traffic, sit next to at work, encounter on social media, and see across the kitchen table--are all experiencing the collateral damage of living.