Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life...
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
I said to the man who stood at the gate of years, “Give me light, that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And the man replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than the known way.”...
Even so, however strongly we believe that our relationship with God begins here and now, life in its fullness—life described as “eternal” because it only rings true if it is somehow analogous to the depth and quality of our best, seemingly timeless, earthly...
The story of Jesus enables me to envision God as One who genuinely cares for each and all of us. In Jesus, God confronts the Darkness face to face, Incarnate, for our sake. Jesus is Light to the gentle face of God. The story of Jesus says that God laughs with us in...
Each of us is called to prophetic agony—to speak the Word, to do justice and righteousness. We are most truly ourselves when we live within God’s insecurity, acknowledging Yahweh’s sovereignty over creation, taking full responsibility as contingent creatures who yet...
The reason why our childhoods were one enthusiasm after another was that we hadn’t yet found an organizing center for our lives and a goal that would demand our all and our best. The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the righteous God. Christian...
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us...
Surrender is not so much a giving up as it is an opening up. It is a dynamic living and striving in the face of the unknown. When we surrender in faith we enter into the power of God, into the realm of all possibility.
This then is our dilemma: how to transmit faith from one generation to the next without falsifying it as a mere cultural appendage, the icing on the cake of Americanism, a family idiosyncrasy like a preference for crunchy or smooth peanut butter. For the fact that...