Every truth, every deed, every teaching is reduced to nothing more than religious noise when it isn't placed under and clothed in the commandment to love.
01878 – The Commandment to Love Covers All
read more
01857 – Doubt Can Lead to Faith
Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn’t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God’s...
01528 – Versions of Christianity
Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked....I am filled with unutterable...
01516 – A Serious Malady of the Soul
A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relationship with God. We read our chapters, have our short...
01439 – God’s People? Neglecting the Poor?
God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all--no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals or how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.
01379 – Interpreting “God’s Word”
The issue should not be oversimplified into whether people will live by God's word or mere human teaching. Given this choice, all religious people will choose "God's word." But for all sides of the debate, God's word is not available directly, only through human...
01358 – This World vs. Next World
If you think being religious, being Christian, being spiritual is getting ready for the next world, you've missed the message of Jesus. Jesus didn't come here to get you ready for the next world; he came into this world to transform you into people through whom he...
01281 – Be Willing to “Take Sides”
Nothing is quite so uninteresting as a religious moralism that is always on the side of the angels but never fights any particular evil; which advocates brotherhood, but never in a specific situation; and which admonishes men to be just, but never hazards an opinion...
01181 – Studying Hymnody
A hymn can be defined as a poetic statement of a personal religious encounter or insight, universal in its truth, and suitable for corporate expression when sung in stanzas to a hymn tune. Perhaps few forms of poetry are so widely known and used, and so generally...
00899 – The Mission of Church Music
The ideal of church music is found in its function. This function is religious: to bring to stronger and clearer consciousness and to greater vitality our inherent religious nature. At the heart of church music must be the consciousness of this religious nature: the...