You may have noticed in my writings that I seldom talk about beliefs, even though I am a Christian. What I write about is the relationship with God, about how do you, how do I, translate our beliefs into a life that echoes Jesus’ relationship with his Abba, the closeness of that relationship? I am […]
Each person has an inner lens through which s/he views the world. The lens can be clouded with prejudices, assumptions, preferences, self-serving attitudes or it can be clearer, able to see reality more truthfully. The source of these things that can cloud our vision of reality can be our religion, our culture and even the […]
As we in the Christian church regroup in an era where the church has lost much of its authority in our country, I think we need to look deeply within for why we have turned so many people off in the last forty years. From the scandals of the Catholic priests to the Protestant politicians […]
We are so steeped in the culture, we don’t even know where the culture ends and we begin. So much of the culture slipped in under the radar of our pre-cognitive brains when we were small children that we can’t see what in us belongs to the culture and what belongs to our self. This […]
Every church, every denomination has a set of beliefs about God and Jesus Christ that informs its worship and practices. What is amazing about the variety and breadth of these beliefs is that they all are so different, yet they all come from one source, the Holy Bible. Together all the churches are the body […]
The story in Exodus of the Hebrew people enslaved by the Egyptians, oppressed by the work of building monuments, pyramids, to the glory of the oppressor, Pharaoh, moves us today. Every part of the story resonates in us—the oppression, the plagues, escaping from the Egyptian army, wandering for years in the wilderness and finally the […]
There is a glass ceiling in the church that limits how far we will go in loving God and following Christ. Every sect and denomination has confined the relationship with God into a box of beliefs with which it feels comfortable. If Catholics hold to the practice of the veneration of Mary and the saints […]
When I was growing up in the forties and fifties, in the Christian church things were pretty much set in concrete. One was a Presbyterian(like my family) or Catholic or Methodist or Baptist or Episcopalian. We didn’t entertain other beliefs, we didn’t visit other churches, and certainly if we were Protestant, we would never enter […]
I sometimes think it’s a miracle that I am back in the church, given the church in which I was raised and how far from it I wandered. While I grew from a toddler to a young teen my family belonged to a southern Presbyterian church in Louisville, Kentucky. Every Sunday for those eleven years […]