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In the end, Christian Zionism reduces Jews to the status of pawns in the fulfillment of end-times prophecies that many Christian preachers love to speak and write about.
teaching others by their example to live by Jesus’ spiritual method of radical, nondiscriminatory love and courageous truth-telling.
practical dilemma: do we Christians want to continue to enfranchise scoundrels who hold the right beliefs but perpetuate harm? And conversely, do we want to exclude good and genuine people—Christlike people, in fact—who in good conscience cannot affirm our lists of beliefs, even though they are wholeheartedly following the way of Christ?
I used to think that things were real, and change was something that happened to them over time. Now I think that change is real, and things are events that happen over time.
He proposed that energy and matter were less like oil and water (two things that normally don’t mix) and more like water and ice (two manifestations of the same thing).
In short, it would allow us to get unstuck and get back on the path of maturing as a religion, and doing our part to help our species mature as well, before we, in our immaturity, blow the whole thing to smithereens.
The world needs religions that teach us to love our neighbor as ourselves, remembering that our neighbor includes the refugee, the sick, the poor, the outsider, the outcast, the other, and even the enemy. The world needs religions that teach us to transform our swords into plowshares, our bullets into
The world needs religions that are anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, gender-equal, and characterized by compassion and wisdom rather than greed, arrogance, and dogmatism. And Christianity could
It’s one of the things that disturbs pastors on sleepless nights: why do so many Christians change so little?
Or we can stay with a good-natured but firm defiance, determined to keep our integrity and speak our truth as best we can, as long as we can, from the outside edge of the inside, staying centered in genuine humility and love.
I can find my neighbors—both religious and secular—who are engaging in a parallel process in their communities. In a spirit of humility and generosity, we can confess our shortcomings and share our treasures, working together for the common good of all our fellow creatures on this beautiful, fragile planet.
vision of collaboration for the common good.
Religion, at its best, is what re-ligaments or reconnects us to God, one another, and creation.
of us, a story in which there is no them, a story in which we tear down the walls that have divided us and from the rubble build bridges. That is a way I can stay Christian.
that is free from human beings showing their worst as well as their best.
We wake up in an ongoing cosmic story of interdependence and constant dynamic change. Delio explains,
Stage by stage, these complex chemicals come together as single-cell life forms. Starting about 3.4 billion years ago, some of these simple life forms start producing oxygen as a byproduct of their existence, and with more oxygen, the planet slowly becomes more hospitable to more kinds of organisms.
540 million years ago,
new organisms develop in what we call the Cambrian Explosion.
first hominins emerge about 2.5 million years ago.
somehow, we reverse our accelerating slide into catastrophic climate change and environmental overshoot.
know the earth and our own bodies,
to see our world religions as sources of energy
thought is a physical reality:
embrace the idea that something big and beautiful and alive is evolving in the universe,
cultivate a zest for living and a spirit of adventure,
trust in the process, the process of evolving life, the process of birth and growth of
In this telling, the diverse stories are not flawed historical accounts any more
than an icon is a failed attempt at photo-realism.
Christians who typically reduce Christian salvation to a cure for guilt.
So I pick up the work of solidarity in my Christian tradition, and I do so looking for collaborators in other traditions,
explicitly religious and not. If we are to avoid self-destruction, it will require solidarity across all our traditions.
separation. Instead, you seek love through solidarity.
In that great space of harmony, you will discover a unity that thrives in diversity and a diversity that contributes to unity, like many instruments and voices coming together to make the same glorious music, full of aching joy and soaring sorrow. In that space, we will call one another family,
Most are quiet people, living ordinary lives of extraordinary love and grace. When they’re attacked, they keep moving forward with humble, gracious confidence.
So here I am. I find myself in relationship with this insistent You that I encounter in the universe.
These texts and traditions do not reveal one final, ever-unchanging understanding of God. They reveal how notions of God have always been evolving over time, how they constantly
grow, relapse, recover, adjust, and grow some more. It’s there in full color.
Jesus called it the kingdom of God, the idea that God and creation are part of one integrated reality that unites all things in one beloved community.
Instead, I need a community of spiritual activists who share a vision of a bold exodus from systems of oppression, a wilderness journey toward a better day, when we will turn swords and guns into garden tools and musical instruments.
Instead, I need prayers that transform me and my companions into spiritual revolutionaries who create good trouble, as John Lewis said,
No, I don’t need a constricted “Christian worldview” that teaches me to see the world as a machine and God as the almighty engineer who created it and now tinkers with it. The striving I experience in the universe around me, the sense that the whole universe itself is filled with a spirit (or Spirit) that is brooding, gestating, laboring, becoming, yearning, learning, reaching, like plants growing toward light, like salmon leaping up rapids toward a life-giving telos, or like lifeless planets undergoing metamorphosis from hot volcanic hells to Edens full of emerald rain forests and shimmering
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I see it again: the worst moments can set the stage for the best moments, if we do not give up and succumb to despair or cynicism … if we keep striving.
forward, we will recognize a basic insight of systems theory: the well-being of any subsystem depends on the well-being of the larger systems of which it is part.
As a Christian, I would say we are joining God in God’s loving desire for the well-being of the beloved.
I see Christianity as my heart’s path into this mysterious and sacred web. But others find themselves on other paths, and I know that each of those paths has its own unique treasures, just as mine does.
We can’t help but feel that the language of Christianity creates a make-believe world, a
rabbit hole, an alternate reality, where angels and demons are real but climate change and evolution aren’t.
“A person who knew nothing but creatures would never need to attend to any sermons, for every creature is full of God and is a book.”
And even urban and suburban churches are realizing that if they own land, they shouldn’t see it as a “landscaping expense,” but, rather, they should cherish it as a place to heal, preserve, and re-wild.
