It's a frightful thing - thinking you have to get God right in order to get God to love you, thinking you're always one error away from damnation. It's a kind of legalism, really... How ironic. The very condition of humanity is to be wrong about God. The moment we...
A young minister asked me today for my philosophy of ministry in a nutshell. Before I could even think, this came out of my mouth: “If love can’t win it, it can’t be won; if love can’t do it, it can’t be done; in the end, love is the only answer.”
I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills, spirituality pills, and morality pills, and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has...
And if you don't think you have anything to be grateful for, keep looking. Because you don't just receive optimism. You can't wait for things to be great and then be grateful for that. You've got to behave in a way that promotes that.
When you think of faith as a war to be won, you will see people as enemies to be conquered. When you think of faith as a world to be explored, you will see people as neighbors to be loved.
Matthew writes: “[Herod] sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Jesus is born, but in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “at a devastating price.” No one knows how many children died; the New Testament alone documents the...
I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive...and open to growth.
The great problem with dominant white theologians, especially white men, is their tendency to speak as if they and they alone can set the rules for thinking about God. That is why they seldom turn to the cultures of the poor, especially people of color, for resources...
Many religious people think that it’s all a merit badge system—all achievement, accomplishment, performance, and perfection. The good people win and the bad people lose. Of course, once we cast anything as a win-lose scenario, the irony is that everybody loses. Why...
I went to church, thinking it would be like an epidural, that it would take the pain away... But church isn't like an epidural; it's like a midwife... I thought faith would say, "I'll take away the pain and discomfort," but what it ended up saying was, "I'll sit with...