If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal...
I ask myself whether we are using sufficiently one of the doors that leads to God—the door named Beauty… One can find God through the door of truth, for truth also attracts us. But many of our contemporaries are little Pilates who ask: “What is truth?” and remain...
I now read Christ's being "lifted up" as image language echoing a passage in the letter to the Ephesians that speaks of God putting all things "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:22). As a beautiful paraphrase puts it: God has put everything without exception into Christ's...
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
What makes the Bible God's Word isn't its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that,...
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Samuel understands well that people of faith cannot withdraw from public questions. He understands well that every decision about God brings along with it an implicit decision about sociopolitical-economic power. This narrative concerns the attractiveness and danger...
In the world order we know, there is no place for peace and justice, for equal distribution of material and cultural goods, and for the dignity of every human being. Jesus took a stance for those values and was cynically disposed of as a rabble-rouser. The worst part...
"To live without risk is to risk not living," my paternal grandmother used to say. The way of trust is risky business, no doubt about it. To change careers suddenly because one feels fulfilled, to assume the energy-depleting care of elderly parents, to retreat for...
Judging by the polls of modern Americans' beliefs and practices, there is a much greater diversity of opinion about salvation even among the adherents of evangelicalism and fundamentalism than is evident rom the confident, insistent voices of their leaders and...