A short list of questions we Christians need to be better about asking ourselves regarding our beliefs: How might I be wrong? How might the passion of my beliefs regarding an issue be causing me to ignore errors about my beliefs themselves? Do my beliefs about social...
Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting...
When we expect our church to never offend and always affirm our social, political, or personal sensibilities, we are looking for a mutual admiration society. Church is designed to transform us into a contrast community gathered around the Way of Jesus. Let's align our...
The identifying characteristic which sets apart Jesus' genuine followers from the rest of the world is not wisdom, nor right theology, nor moral righteousness, nor social power; it is extraordinary love.
As I was lying on a gurney in pre-op awaiting knee replacement surgery three days before Christmas, before the “happy drugs” were administered, I noticed a painting on the wall beside the gurney. It was rather nondescript, a field of blue flowers in a garden of rocks...
I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry...
The communal life envisioned in the vine metaphor raises a strong challenge to contemporary Western models of individual autonomy and privatism. At the heart of the Johannine model is social interrelationship and corporate accountability. The vine and branches...
Salvation is personal, but this hardly needs emphasis... What does need emphasis is that Salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel's story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together. Salvation is...
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue [though it was indeed that]: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in the community. To put it boldly: Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant...
Only those who themselves are suffering will work for the abolition of conditions under which people are exposed to senseless, patently unnecessary suffering, such as hunger, oppression, or torture. …That all suffering is social suffering, then, means that all...