When I look at the Bible, Christian tradition, the views of contemporary Christians, and recent research findings, I'm afraid we've been wrong in shunning homosexual people, refusing to let them be clergy, or even demanding celibacy from them as many churches and individual Christians do.
Read MoreI realized that I had sown a lot of good seeds, tended a lot of vines, and reaped good harvests. I saw that I needed to appreciate those accomplishments but not to continue all of them forever. I also saw that some of them had never been required.
Read MoreIn many pre-patriarchal societies, getting older wasn't negative for women. They were the healers, arbiters of moral law, owners of the sacred lore, and mediators between the realms of flesh and spirit. Because they were seen as having wisdom, they had power. That view is rare now, but it's one we crones could benefit from reclaiming. It may even be one God is calling us to reclaim.
Read More“Conflict about the Bible,” says Christian author Marcus Borg, “is the single most divisive issue among Christians in North America today,” in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.
Read MoreInstead of continuing to depend mainly on procedures and rules, we’d have to start asking deliberately together in our church meetings, “What is God’s will for the world and for the church?”
Read MoreAbove all, God calls the church to be a loving group—one whose members know and care about each other.
Read MoreWe may not notice how empire shows up in our world today, leading many observers to call the U.S. today’s equivalent of first-century Rome. Our lack of awareness sometimes keeps us from seeing how we as Christians need to be opposing the empire’s current manifestations.
Read MoreFor the first time in my life I had realized that dreams had meaning, and that God sometimes gave guidance through them.
Read MoreParker J. Palmer warns about putting too much trust, or at least the wrong kind of trust, in church doctrines and customs.
Read MoreYou Lost Me is about young insiders—young adults who once thought of themselves as Christians but have left the church or even left the Christian faith.
Read MoreWhen at midlife I started seriously considering what I believed, what the Bible said, and what I saw the church doing, I began gradually revising my understanding of God.
Read MoreSome of our mental pictures, like some paintings and printed pictures that claim to be Jesus, seem very different from what the earthly Jesus must have really looked like.
Read MoreFor about the first 50 years of my life, I had a very different view from the one presented by the book I review on the next three pages of this Connections.
Read MoreJesus apparently spoke often about money, and he didn’t mince any words about how it should be used. The Old Testament prophets did the same. In fact, use of money is one of the subjects addressed most often in the Bible.
Read MoreCurrent events may therefore reveal the need to question some of our previously unquestioned assumptions about our country’s ways of functioning. They may show the need for a fresh look at our nation and its history.
Read MoreThe Bible communicates God’s word to us. These books helped me see the real message of the Bible, which I’d been missing.
Read MoreIn his intriguing book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Penguin, 2011), Colin Woodard points out that there has never really been one America. From the beginning, there have been several Americas.
Read MoreFor coping with adult life and doing the ministries that God calls all of us to do, what we learned in kindergarten isn't enough.
Read MoreMy travels remind me of how physical journeys are like the journey of life and the journey we make toward God.
Read MoreIf we’re growing as Christians, we keep moving through different stages of faith as we go through life. They are like successive levels on a spiral path that goes around a mountain repeatedly as it goes up the mountain.
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