To set God’s name to politics does not turn the scales any more than to say ‘now in God’s name I am going out to steal’, or – ‘in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I shall go hang myself. What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day...
03978 – Good Human Beings
I never understood why we have to let religion and politics and things like that stand in the way of just being good human beings.
03012 – Control vs. Redemption
When our theology and politics as Christians is completely preoccupied with how other people might be sinning rather than how our own sin contributes to the problems of our world, that is when we know our religion is about control rather than redemption.
01914 – Being Better at Differing
When I was called here, I was charged with remaining politically neutral. And I've worked at that. Well let me tell you some things that are politically neutral-- * Encouraging you to not bear false-witness. That's politically neutral. You might want to fact-check to...
01619 – A Different Way to Think
But our commitment is to do what we have promised, not to meet expectations, whether our own or those of others. If we can learn to measure effectiveness in terms of discerning what is really worth doing and keeping a covenant to do it, we might be both faithful and...
01449 – Are We Making the World More Gracious?
The question is not whether we should mix Christianity and politics. To follow Jesus is to be political. The issue is whether our understanding of Christianity makes the world more gracious or less gracious. Do we work against injustice, oppression, greed, and...
01236 – Dangers of Sociopolitical-Economic Power
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...
00876 – Music: Necessity, Not Luxury
We believe that in a world of political, economic, and personal disintegrations, music is not a luxury but a necessity…because it is the persistent focus of intelligence, aspiration and good will.
00860 – The Arts are Not Simply Skills
The arts are not simply skills: Their concern is the intellectual, ethical and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human...
00806 – How Did the Earliest Christians Worship?
We can learn a great deal about worship by looking at the earliest Christians, for the culture that surrounded them was in many ways similar to ours in twenty-first century North America. Then and now the population is highly pluralistic, with the people’s...