The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on...
Jesus never says to the poor: "come, find the church," but he says to those of us in the church: "go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned."
The rule is you have to dance a little bit in the morning before you leave the house because it changes the way you walk out in the world.
Nationalism keeps telling us Christians to take up our swords and make nations "Christian" by any means necessary. Jesus keeps calling us Christians to take up our crosses and be like him, serving the world through grace, humility, compassion, and self-sacrificial...
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. from In Blackwater Woods
The church tends to hold up a standard of “biblical manhood” that simultaneously emasculates men (you are helpless to control your sexual urges) and beastifies them (you must RULE your marriage and family and keep them under control). Neither approach reflects...
I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
One lesson that we Christians have not learned in the last 2,000+ years is that Jesus had no political control over the Roman Empire and he still changed the entire world. We keep trying to change the world the way the Roman Empire did, instead of the way Jesus did.
Our public witness as Christians should cause our world to say, "look at the power of their love," not "look at how much they love power."
When we refuse to have nuanced conversations about deeply complex issues and choose instead to impose our narrow categories of right and wrong upon others, we become incapable of ever moving forward to work together for a better world. We must do better.