christian living on Ethics

In the Christian faith, we frequently take for granted how radically Jesus evens the playing field. No matter your wealth, your position, let alone your race or gender, all of us are equal in God’s ey...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don't.

Faith is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy promised in Christ…. This trust in the goodwill or mercy of God first calms our hearts and then inflames us to give thanks to God for his mercy so ...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

Lord, help us to be a people known for the ways in which we live out our faith by loving and serving all people, even those who, in the world’s eyes, have little to offer us. By treating them with dig...

We fixate on sins of commission far too much. We practice holiness by subtraction-don't do this, don't do that, and you're okay. The problem with that is this: you can do nothing wrong and...

Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.

Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved.

Almighty God, too often we settle for brokenness in our lives. Rather than offering forgiveness, we hold onto offense. Rather than pursuing justice, we turn away . Rather than offering mercy, we c...

All: Gracious God, we have become callous to those in need, holding back compassion yet unsparing with judgment. We defend our motivations, rather than using all you have given us to love and care for...

Live out your faith this week by doing good deeds, God is with you.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…. Faith, being belief that isn...

Our love to God is measured by our everyday fellowship with others and the love it displays.

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

When people are asked what they believe in, they give, not merely different answers, but different sorts of answers. Someone might say, “I believe in UFOs”—that means, I think UFOs are real. “I believ...

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis... once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this:  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologis...

In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

The faith by which we are justified is faith. Faith is like a channel through which the benefits of Christ flow to us. We are not justified on account of faith; we are justified through faith. It is t...

There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Fa...

Father God, too often we show preference to those who appear to have it all together, to those whom we consider complete: the self-motivated, self-made, and self-sufficient. We honor the rich and look...

W.H. Auden is one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, who grew up in England but who spent some of his life in the United States. In November 1939 he found himself in a German-language movie th...

O God, Father of us all, we praise you for so binding humanity together that we must each lean upon the strength and labor of others. We ask your blessing on all men and women who have worked to build...

One day, as Leo Tolstoy, the renowned Russian author, was walking down the street when he encountered a man in worn, shabby clothing. The homeless man asked him if he had any money to spare. Tolstoy s...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

If I withhold mercy, I have lost touch with the gospel. I have lost touch with God’s undeserved kindness and pardon.

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the tension that all ministries must live in; the focus on this world or the wor...