“You can rest in peace only because you are awake.” Back many years ago when I was teaching a comparative religion class at a South Carolina technical college, the final assignment was a much-dreaded group project where students had to invent their own religion. They
“I need you to talk with an ordination candidate for moment. He has a question for you.” The voice on the phone was the pastor whose independent Atlanta-based church had ordained me just over a decade ago. “Sure,” I said, not at all sure that
When we begin to imagine God relies entirely on us to get God’s point across, we risk promoting idolatry rather than relationship. When we forget that God is alive and still creating, we can leave God out of our worship and lock God out of
Controversies swirl today, in our embattled Church, over whether this story or that in the Bible “actually” happened. Did the sun stand still in the sky until the Israelites won that battle? Did Noah really bring two of every kind of animal on the Earth
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” Hamlet tells his friend Horatio, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” About the details of the final judgment, C.S. Lewis simply stated: “There will be surprises.” The underlying promise of the Resurrection is this promise of
There is little agreement regarding the spiritual or physical resurrection of Christ. We use our minds to look at the event only as a theological issue. But people often gather around a common set of values and not theological beliefs. I believe in the resurrection
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the
What if we were to understand the resurrection and ascension not as the bodily translation of some individuals to another world — a mythology no longer credible to us — but as the promise of God to be permanently present, ‘bodily’ present to us, in
To die, and to be reborn. It’s a powerful notion, so powerful and pervasive in human societies that there is no surprise that Christianity puts death and rebirth at the core. And it provides an easy way to take a measure of someone’s beliefs. Are
The resurrection has taken on a new meaning in my life this last year. I have come out of the closet and had to face myself in a new way, and I had been so reluctant and confused about it that it literally took an