If God doesn't give up on us, we had better not despair of ourselves. We can always do better--especially if we remember the opposite of despair is not optimism but hope. Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts. But...
The word “scapegoating” originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16. According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal....
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...
I am not an evangelical and don’t want to be one. But my life was made immeasurably better by some of the truths evangelicals taught me. The power of those truths stayed with me even though I never signed on again. The same is true for many people. And so I am not...
There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world. from Credo
I have learned to use my anger for good. . . . Without it, we would not be motivated to rise to a challenge. It is an energy that compels us to define what is just and unjust.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least...