colossians on Superstition

“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

In The God-Shaped Brain , Timothy R. Jennings tells a well-attested story about how belief can affect the body. Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local...

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ...

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge*, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.” (*or Faith)

Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the g...

The great danger of Christian discipleship is that we should have two religions: a glorious, biblical Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world, that in the cross and resurrection of Christ makes...

The Incarnation [and I might add Communion] remains a scandal to anyone who wants religion to be a purely spiritual matter, an etherized, bloodless bliss.

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

By misinterpreting the Enlightenment and the corresponding rise of empiricism as an existential threat to Christian faith, many frightened Christians sequestered themselves into rooms of certitude.

Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without.

Faithfulness in small things is a big thing to God.

One time a little boy and his father got to tour Europe. During their journey, they visited a magnificent cathedral, where the boy found himself captivated by the vibrant stained glass windows. He cou...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity..

Almighty God, we trust in our own strength, abilities, and resources. We think too highly of what we have to offer this world. The truth is we cannot do anything without your strength and all we have ...

Psychoanalysis . . . daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down.

The word “sacrament” comes from the Latin word sacramentum. It was used in two ways at the time. First, it described the oath taken by soldiers in the Roman army. It was a sacred pledge of allegiance....

Martin Lindstrom observes: When people viewed images associated with the strong brands-the iPods, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others-their -their brains registered the exact same patterns of...

Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...

We’re afraid when we’re suddenly caught off our guard and don’t know what to do. We’re afraid when our presuppositions and assumptions no longer account for what we’re up against, and we don’t know wh...

A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth

God could have chosen any method to save us, but he used the cross. The cross is our spiritual centerpiece, the sign of our soul’s emancipation. However, the pre-Christian cross might offer a sliver ...

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...