The Church is not to be found at the "center" of a left/right political world. The Church is to be a species of its own kind, confounding left, right, and center, and finding its identity from the "center" of God's life in Christ.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources;...
It is a kind of theological folly to suppose that God has made the entire world just for human beings; or to suppose that God is interested in only one of the millions of species that inhabit God's good earth.
We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. from The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. Creation has a pattern of wisdom; and we dare not shield ourselves from it, or we literally will lose our soul. We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still...
In these challenging, difficult times [pandemic], we are discovering a wisdom that we needed all along, and that wisdom is that we are all connected. We are not separate. We used to think that we caught diseases as individuals: "I'm sick; you're not." But now we...