The first elementary thing about being Christian is of course to refuse to bear false witness. And for me that means recognizing that I am accountable for what I do not know, and that I put myself in a morally perilous position when I do not know about the core convictions of my neighbors. The…
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Christianity
When you have more than you need, and others have none.
There are no peace churches in the United States. Because when you have got more than you need, and other people do not have enough to live on, you only keep the excess by violence. You do not keep it by appeals to faith or to love or to reason. And the churches are up…
NATURE AS MIRROR by Richard Rohr
In “The Canticle of the Sun,” Francis consistently uses the Italian preposition per, by which he is saying that God is praised through (not for) the very existence of the sun, moon, stars, wind, air, weather, water, fire and earth. This is significant and telling. Their very existence gives glory whether any human ever sees…
New poem: All The Shiny Things
It’s national poetry day in the UK and I’m joining in! Here is a poem I wrote recently. All The Shiny Things Why do we wait along the damp street? The sirens wail while birds hover and people stop to stare. Our attempt is forlorn, our hope abandoned. Despair is our dress and sadness our…
What The Church Could Learn at Design School
The dread of criticism is the death of genius. –William Gilmore Simms I have been thinking a great deal about criticism, specifically, how a certain understanding of criticism, such as that found to be held by various people in the field of visual arts, could potentially carry over to other areas of life. Being a…
I Get Lost
When I say ‘I am a Christian’ I’m not shouting ‘I’m saved.’ I’m whispering ‘I get lost,’ That is why I chose this way… When I say… “I am a Christian” I’m not shouting “I’m clean livin’.” I’m whispering “I was lost, Now I ‘m found and forgiven.” When I say… “I am a Christian”…
Food Not Bombs
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. –Martin Luther King Jr. www.foodnotbombs.net
Is Religion a ‘Virus of the Mind?’
[I]t seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day. … [U]nless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply. … This is how science (unlike religion)…
Tolerating Tolerance
Tolerance costs me nothing. Loving others — seeking their good, willing their prosperity and happiness, genuinely desiring their companionship — this is the hazardous business of community, of relationship-building, of making and sustaining friendships for the long haul. Tolerance is all too happy to avoid all this. Tolerance turns out to be a means for…
The Pax Romana
As Klaus Wengst writes: “That Pilate had Jesus executed on the cross shows that the death of Jesus is indissolubly bound up with the political peace that there was at that time, the Pax Romana, produced and guaranteed by Roman power. In the view of the procurator this execution, like many others, was virtually an…