It’s fine to speak of Christianity being unconditional love all the way down. It’s exhilarating to read St. Isaac of Syria write of even Hell being filled with God’s love. However, it is frustrating when various Christian groups totally disagree on what comprises loving actions in real life and death situations. And it is downright […]
John’s Passion primarily involves two long conversations, one at the Last the Supper (14-18) and the second in Pilate’s chambers (18:28-19:16). Together these make up 6 of his 21 chapters. Obviously, they are important. The first begins with Jesus’ proclaiming, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”; the second ends with Pilate asking, […]
This is a very special day for me. In November 1999, I began to feel ill in the middle of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In four days, I had heart bypass surgery. For the first time in my life, I faced the reality of my own death. After two months recovery I returned to work on […]
Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrate Jesus’ birth on Epiphany. Their equivalent of our Christmas Eve service sometimes involves the Wise Men’s search for the baby Jesus. In the dark of the night very tall, very black monks dress as the Magi. They then go through the village, stopping at every hut, knocking at every door. Very […]
Bob suggested another challenge to Christian Ethics might be that people who certainty. I got that all the time during my ministry. Many said they missed the old days when you were told what was right and what was wrong. “At least, you knew what you were supposed to believe in those days,” they said. […]
You could make a case that humanity’s greatest problem is fear. We do not follow Jesus, because we are afraid to let go of what we mistakenly think gives us security. Our authorities, even the best, work to keep us in fear, because if we are afraid, they can pretty much do anything they please. […]
Bob, Rita, and Derek all observed we do not base our lives entirely on what Jesus said in the Gospels, because we are sinners and live in a sinful world. From the very beginning, Christians understood this. They struggled with what Jesus’ words meant in this interim period between Jesus’ lifetime and the establishment of […]
There are two ways to understand forgiveness. The first focuses on it as a law that calls on us to repress our natural human instincts in order to do what God wants. It usually ends up either dividing people between those who obey and those who do not. Or, it promotes confession of sin over […]
Bob suggests we’ll always have false prophets, because we’ll always have people looking for religious interpretations that support their preconceived ideas and prejudices. I think we are bound to have more, because of the way modern media uses words. We are leaving the age of the printing press when people saw books as “hard copy’ […]
Jesus like the prophets sees sin as injustice. The similarity is obvious when he describes the Last and Ultimate Judgment based on giving food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger and clothing the naked, caring for the sick and visiting the imprisoned (Matthew 25: 31-46). Or again when he insists […]
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