The fourth Beatitude, Blessed Are They Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness, is, to me, the heart of the Beatitudes. To step on this rung of the ladder, after acknowledging that we need God in our poverty of spirit, after mourning our losses and suffering, and after seeing ourselves as meek, just one of billions […]

We are raised to be “letter of the law” people. We learn to obey our parents. Our teachers. Our traffic laws. The laws of our nation. The trouble is that we’re not very good at following the letter of the law. All one has to do is to drive the streets and highways of our […]

How might we summarize Jesus’ teachings and the life he modeled? We need a guide, a condensed version, a rule to compare ourselves to, a standard. Jesus said so many things, but he saw them all as fulfilling the law of the Old Testament which is about love. So in this essay I will endeavor […]

  What is righteousness? And how do we become righteous? The word righteousness is translated throughout the New Testament from the Greek noun, dikaiosyne, which means both “the state of doing what is in agreement with God’s standards” and “the state of being in proper relationship with God.” To be righteous is to do both: […]