God did not give you the spirit of control over others, nor did God give others the spirit of control over you, but instead God gave you the spirit of self-control, of self-discipline, and self-moderation. Because the Holy Spirit lives in you, you are...
Where love rules there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Jesus instructs not by means of the rule, but by means of the exception... Parables, paradoxes, hyperboles, and extreme commandments all disorient only in order to reorient us... I would say that what is reoriented by these extreme sayings is less our will than our...
The church is not an institution forcing us to follow rules but a community inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its table.
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...
Let the pulse of our heart throb now, according to the cadences of your rule: command and we will obey, overrule and we will yield, lead and we will walk, where we would never think to go. from Prayers for a Privileged People
Rules at best are signposts, never hitching posts. Personally, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a Christian rule. There are probably only acts that are more or less Christian depending on the motives prompting them. But if we say, "Down with rules," we must at...
Christians…live and die in hope. The Christian virtue of hope transforms the virtues of aging… It is why elderly Christians can bear the sadness of memory without being overcome by it, and why they can insist on the truth of a story that challenges the ultimate rule...