relationships and community on Right and Wrong

The ideas of right and wrong among the Hebrews are forensic ideas; that is, the Hebrew always thinks of the right and the wrong as if they were to be settled before a judge. Righteousness is to the He...

The True Self is all about right relationship, not requirements. It’s not about being correct; it’s about being connected, which you always were—you just didn’t realize it.

The absence of anger . . . can, in my opinion, be a most alarming symptom . . . If the Jews cursed more bitterly than the Pagans this was, I think, at least in part because they took right and wrong m...

Lesslie Newbigin, the great missiologist and missionary, shares a powerful analogy of repentance from his days serving as a missionary in India. I remember once visiting a village in the Madras di...

O God, you judge your people with righteousness; we judge our neighbors either right or wrong. Your Servant defended the cause of the poor; it is because of our greed that many still want. You bring d...

Imagine you have an invisible recorder around your neck that, for all your life, records every time you say to somebody else, “You ought.” It only turns on when you tell somebody else how to live. In ...

If the Prof is 10 min late... I was in my freshman year in college, and Statistics was the final class before Thanksgiving break. When the professor was ten minutes late, I and several others got up ...

Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our...

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...

“Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.”

One needs to be right before getting righteous.

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

Compassion does not demand that we know who is right and who is wrong. In fact, it does not ask for us to know anything at all about [people] except the fact that they are in need. As I facilitated...

Called to Pastor, Inclined to Argue When I was graduating from college in the mid-2000s, I was encouraged to take a career test to determine where my personality type would fit in the working world. ...

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

Many people live righteously for selfish or misguided reasons. If you are striving to please God, examine your motives today.

Once, while on vacation, on our way to church, Terri and I got into a disagreement over something. When I felt I was losing, to make my point, I stopped the car and got out. We were on a country road....

We trample the blood of the Son of God if we think we are forgiven because we are sorry for our sins. The only explanation for the forgiveness of God and for the unfathomable depth of His forgetting i...

In a letter of Justin Martyr, written in the second century, there is a remarkable passage. He writes to a friend and explains to him how essential it is that this man, who had sinned, should come bac...

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper: Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wa...

Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights—chocolate, surfing, kissing—it does not enjoy any mainline access to o...

If someone has done something wrong even at a personal level, the right thing to do is not to gossip about it, not to tell everybody else, not to allow resentment to build up and fester, and certainly...

What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.

The philosopher Aristotle taught that meekness was to be highly desired. He described it as a mean between anger and indifference, as the middle ground between excessive anger on the one hand and the ...

Myths about Faith and Work Faith is to be lived out 24-7-52. For many Christians this involves living out our faith at work. But several myths about faith and work can prevent us from being effecti...

The current popular notion that judging others is in itself a sin leads to such inappropriate maxims as 'I'm okay and you're okay.' It encourages a conspiracy of moral indifference whi...

The political cartoonist and Op-Ed writer Tim Kreider has provided us with some insight into the “world of outrage” we currently inhabit. A world that has been amplified by the dawn of the Internet an...

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prin...

Father-God, our burden bearer; Jesus, God the Son and lover of our souls; Spirit of God–giver of life and power: Thank You! Thank You for those we love and those who love us. Thank You for mothers and...

In her aptly title book, Being Wrong , Kathleen Schulz describes just how difficult it is to be wrong: A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the ti...