discussion on Darkness

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

Before I knew God, I knew nature. I knew the feeling of warmth from the sun on my skin. The crunch of leaves on the sidewalk. The sparkle of the fresh powder snow. It was not until I was a teenager th...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. … Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude. ...

We all have shadows and skeletons in our backgrounds. But listen, there is something bigger in this world than we are, and that something bigger is full of grace and mercy, patience and ingenuity. The...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

Nearly everybody knows of at least one sin habit in their life that they wish to leave behind them. Yet, no matter what they do, it seems impossible for them to be free of this habit, character flaw, ...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p...

In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor...

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, "Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!" And He will say to us: "Vile beings, you who are in the image of...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

The unjust steward who, hearing he is going to be fired, doctors his master’s accounts to secure another job, is commended precisely because he acted. The point does not concern morality but apathy. H...

It’s easy to label what we consider “good things” in our lives as gifts from God and to welcome them with gratitude. But when difficult things happen, we don’t look at them as part of God’s good plan ...

In Jonathan Kozol’s book, Amazing Grace , he tells of the struggles and sufferings of people in a community in the Bronx, New York. He is amazed at the courage and resilience he found there. He then ...

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children...

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

The famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade includes these haunting lines: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred… Someone had blundered. Theirs not to reason why, ...