[I wrote an earlier version of this, “Groaning Towards Compassion,” in 2005. It’s helpful to know that when I first wrote this I was experiencing a level of grief more intense than any I have suffered beforehand or afterwards—so far. What I [...]
“My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my insides ached for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt” (Song of Solomon/Song of Songs [...]
Here’s a spiritual practice I commend. It’s very indebted to a popular practice known as centering prayer. But I find the word “centering” somewhat misleading. It seems to me that my Christian faith teaches that to center on God, or on Jesus, [...]
“God” isn’t exactly a pronoun, but like pronouns, the word has often functioned, at least partly, as an “indexical” term: “Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose reference shifts from context to context: some paradigm examples are ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and [...]
[This is for a course where some of Gordon Kaufman’s works have been assigned.] Gordon Kaufman eventually came to identify God “as the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos”—In the Beginning … Creativity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 48. This certainly converges with [...]
I speak faithfully of God with good reason when I awaken trustfully to manifestations of an ongoing dialogical relationship involving the uniquely all-inclusive reality* (God**) with all less inclusive realities. These manifestations are moments of varying intensity where this dialogical relationship seems [...]
In process thought, things, properties and even the most universal of natural regularities are somewhat repeatable ways of newly interacting, “eddies in the constant flux of process.” No matter how stable or fixed they look, they never fully describe the novelty involved [...]
[Excerpted from John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 1988), pp. 42-43, 55-59, 105.] The book of Jonah places a parable not only against the entire prophetic tradition but against the very heart of [...]
Instead of asking, “Does God exist?,” let’s ask, “How shall we interact with that wherein we and all others ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28)?” It’s too late even to ask about the reality of that wherein we and [...]
[This was originally a brochure written in 2004—Fr. Charles] “God is love, and those who dwell in love dwell in God, and God dwells in them.”—1 John 4:16b “Christ is the Logos of whom all people were partakers; and those who [...]