To be sure, it was not Easter Sunday but Holy Saturday, but, the more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still awaiting Easter; we are not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it f...
The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails,...
In 1916, Infants' and Children's Wear Review insisted upon pink for boys and blue for girls. In 1939, Parents magazine claimed that pink was a good color for boys because it was a pale version of red, which was the color of Mars, the war god. Blue wa...
Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest diff...
The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church’s teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultura...
When people call for “deeds, not creeds,” asking, “What Would Jesus Do?” without much interest in the query, “What has Jesus done?” identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” they are asking for the law without the gospe...
If the eternal Son could become fully human without sin (Heb 4:15), then surely God can communicate his truth through thoroughly human ambassadors while preserving their writings from error.
An implication of God’s independence from the world is that he is who he is eternally and will always be. All of God’s acts are consistent with his nature. God determines the world’s course; the world does not determine God’s course.
They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness, or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or day-dreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape fr...
To demand that a person pee in a cup whenever you wish him to, without a documented reason to suspect that he has been using an illegal drug, is intolerable in our republic. You are saying to him, "I wonder if you are not behaving in a way that I app...
Man is saved if he opens himself to God and to others, even if he is not clearly aware that he is doing so. This is valid for Christians and non-Christians alike -- for all people. . . . We can no longer speak properly of a profane world. A qualitati...
Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the S...
It's all—let's use a very specific word here—miraculous. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light—it's all miraculous, and it always has been.
When God will have any great matters done, he sets his people's hearts to work at prayer by a kind of gracious instinct. He stirs them up and moves their hearts by the influence of his Holy Spirit.
Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated.
And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he th...
Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: 'Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path...
If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search...
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have, Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a de...
A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions stirred whilst reading in an arm-chair, or in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centred and...
Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses the conscience and brings...