The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits... [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man's real value, but only of his creation in t...
...the operative idea here is that there is a right and wrong theology -- a right God and a wrong God. But this is an invalid premise. All versions of God are the same thing: A HUMAN INTERPRETATION OF THE UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
We are half mechanical [physical] and half mysterious [spiritual]; to live in either domain and ignore the other is to be fools or fanatics... We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical realm what God WORK IN in the mysterious realm.
We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical [physical] realm what Gods WORKS IN [us] in the mysterious [spiritual] realm. Beware of any spiritual emotion that you do not work out mechanically...
The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do s...
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not...
...to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovabl...
Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than ...
We have no need to learn to think much of ourselves, to care for ourselves, to consider our own needs, wants, and desires. We already do that far too much. The problem is getting us to think of others, to have a lowliness of mind that springs from hu...
Yet in Paul's letters we can hear something more than his own genius: an echo of female voices, of conversations over the years with the women of the Aegean cloth trade who were his close collaborators. During this long fellowship, the apostle has no...
Mary is no theologian in an academic sense. But as Luke tells the story, she and Elizabeth are the first theologians of a new faith. Their gift is an intrepid willingness to look for God's purpose in their own and one another's lives. If they are blo...
Sometimes the reason offered for seeking aesthetic excellence in the music of the church is that thereby one pleases God. I think that is true. But not because we know what music God enjoys-- though I suspect it must be music which is unified, rich, ...
The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world tha...
It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and privat...
Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the n...
Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to ...
But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for wh...
I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where ...
Introverted seekers need introverted evangelists. It's not that extroverts can't communicate the gospel, either verbally or nonverbally, in ways that introverts find appealing, it's that introverted seekers need to know and see that it's possible to ...
Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they ...
I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the ...
