My Earliest Memory My earliest memory of Jesus in church was a shadowy yellow stained glass picture of Jesus in a dark hall in the Southside Baptist Church in Spartanburg, SC, that I attended with my parents when I was less than six years old.
I can tell you the exact moment that Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean lost my vote. It was January 11, 2004 when an audience member at an Iowa primary forum asked Dean to stop “mean mouthing” President George W. Bush. According to news reports, Dale
When someone asks us, “Who is our neighbor?” we always feel we know what the right answer must be. Our neighbor is somebody absolutely obnoxious: the biggest jerk we can think of. Being neighborly to this character would be like taking castor oil. It’s a
Many people ask me at times, “What’s so difficult to YOU about being a Christian? You don’t subscribe to all of the dogmatic literalism, in fact, you’re too liberal for most liberal Christians. You don’t have all the little rules and formalities about liturgy and
It’s not that Jesus ever asked us to like people; rather he commanded us to love others. And there’s a world of difference between liking and loving. Any woman in a violent domestic situation may love the man who regularly beats her up, but she
In Luke 10, Jesus is asked by an expert in the law what he has to do to inherit eternal life and He replies by citing what is in the law and asks the expert how he reads it. The expert answers by repeating The
Liberation is not free. It’s just that simple. Liberation costs blood, sweat, tears, and even human life. Liberation combined with disobedience cost Moses and the children of Israel 40 years of wondering in the wilderness. Liberation cost Jesus Christ his life and over 1,900 years
The dictionary definition of “terrorize” is “to fill with fear or anxiety: to scare;” “to coerce by threat or violence.” Homophobia is the product of spiritual and religious terrorism. GLBT people are subjected to continuous terrorist assaults, by which established abusive religions seek to undermine
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment; Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition. — Rumi God is bipolar. Rev. Dr. J. Henry Jurgens, a practicing psychiatrist and doctor of divinity at Yale University Divinity School, has diagnosed God almighty as suffering from the disorder that afflicts
It would be easy to toss off some glib, superficial answer to the question of how we may know the God beyond our limited stereotypes — in the words of Paul Tillich, the “God beyond God.” But this would provide no real insight into solving