I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote - where no c...
No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer. Prayer is that which establishes contact with Divine Power and opens the invisible resources of heaven. However dark the way, when we pray, temptation can never master us. The first step downw...
I thought over and over about what I was going to do when Carly overdosed and died. How would we go on? And then I knew: I wouldn’t go on. And then I realized that it was just going to be too painful to actually have to watch her die. Right in fron...
Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he ...
In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla.” “It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,�...
Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men's sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothi...
If you have no faith in yourself, then have faith in the things you call truth. You know what must be done. You may not have courage or trust or understanding or the will to do it, but you know what must be done. You can't turn back. There is now ans...
Here is a fundamental difference between the man of faith and the man of unbelief. The unbeliever is 'of the world', judges everything by worldly standards, views life from the standpoint of time and sense, and weighs everything in the balances of hi...
The narrow path of the righteous is an extremely difficult path to travel. The rough road to victory is a very challenging endeavor that pushes the limits of endurance. Enormous mountains of hardship, boisterous storms of adversity, and several other...
The public talk -- and injuriously! -- Well! are you ignorant of the little importance of such talk? -- The public speak! -- It is not the world, it is only the despicable part of it -- only the ill-natured, who upon the smallest evidence pass rash j...
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble ...
A professionally trained actress should be a better liar, wouldn't you think? But no. I am pathetically underachieved in that area. I can think of a great lie. I'm plenty imaginative. But before the words are even out of my mouth, there's a weird tic...
I do believe Jesus died so we could feel freed up to go after life to the full, so we would feel equpped to take risks and not beat ourselves up when we fail. He didn't die to make our lives look perfect. He died so we could stop feeling as if our li...
When either grace is turned into painted, but rotten nature, as Arminians do, or into wantonness, as others do, the error to me is of a far other and higher elevation, than opinions touching church government. Tenacious adhering to Antinomian errors,...
Finally, it is wrong to say that "nothing" is more basic to the identity of the church than suffering. Nothing is more basic to the identity of the institutional church than the preaching of the gospel, the correct administration of the sacraments, a...
Repentance in Greek means something much closer to "thinking differently afterward" than it does "changing your cheating ways." Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying...
The more time that passes without an answer and the longer we wander through the wilderness of silence and shadow, the more fearful we become that maybe God isn't all we have believed him to be. It's in those moments that Satan plants in us the tempt...
Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylva...
To trust in spite of the look of being forsaken; to keep crying out into the vast, whence comes no returning voice, and where seems no hearing; to see the machinery of the world pauselessly grinding on as if self-moved, caring for no life, nor shifti...
Where the mind is without pain Where knowledge is gain; With you, life is not vain Where hate is a burden Faith in humanity is not entwine The traces of you is me I am you and you are me Where dreams are not met Where the sun set and yet; we still st...
Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle r...
