Do you ever wonder about prayer? Well ... duh! I’ve never met anybody who didn’t wonder about prayer. I mean, just what does it do? Sure, sometimes good things happen for people who pray, but so do bad things. And the same [...]
“Agape” (uh-gah-pay) is the New Testament Greek word for “self-giving love.” In Christian tradition an “Agape” is also the name for informal meals and times of togetherness and mutual sharing. Many scholars believe that an Agape was the earliest setting for [...]
The question I was asked to address is “How does Jesus shape your understanding of God?” But I can’t separate that from this one: “How does your understanding of God shape your understanding of Jesus?” And since this is a session on [...]
“God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir through God.“ (Galatians 4:6-7) “God is love, and those who [...]
Here is where some ancient and current Christian writers and some ancient and current Buddhists find agreement: Separate objects and separate subjects are not ultimately real. Yes, they are distinguishable, and we can certainly call them real in a non-ultimate sense, but [...]
The Nicene Creed is the most widely accepted summation of Christian faith in the world. It was adopted, rejected, revised and finally adopted again by the majority of Christian leaders (bishops) in the 300s amidst a great deal of political infighting (some [...]
[First written in 2007] Part I: On Dawkins’s The God Delusion* Richard Dawkins finds belief in God harmful. Given what he means by “God” and “belief,” he could be right. To his credit, he does seem to be talking about popular and [...]
In every moment I can awaken to a dialogical, endlessly renewing communion with that wherein we and all others “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Communion is intimately sharing others’ distinctive reality. It’s not total absorption—“communion” means “union-with,” and [...]
“Most of the actually existing church acts as a type of drug den with the leaders being like the nicest, most sincere drug dealers. What we pay for are songs, sermons, and prayers that help us avoid our suffering rather than work [...]
In my version of process thought, the uniquely all-inclusive way of newly interacting (God) can just as easily be described as boundlessly self-othering communion—a way of interacting, in order to be newly interacting, must be inherently self-othering, and in order to continue [...]