Culture warriors make crummy Christians. As liberals and conservatives battle for dominance American religion has been co-opted by both sides. Conservatives want to shore up the mainstays of traditional American culture: a civil religion suitable for teaching in the public…

Kingdom preaching is dangerous, and it has always been divisive, but the price of our safe silence has been staggering.

Last year I spent 250 hours driving around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for my job as a hospice chaplain. As I drive I listen to sermons and lectures from cutting edge biblical scholars, theologians and preachers, and podcasts and YouTube…

We come to the Bible seeking a little relief from the drama in our lives and what do we find? A text cracking and sizzling with fear, rage, resentment and wonder. If you want an escape from the drama, the…

There are two kinds of Christians: those who are comfortable with some version of traditional orthodoxy, and those who worry that their religion has gone off the rails. Bishop N.T. Wright (“Tom” to his friends) belongs in the second category….

If religion were a thing that money could buy the rich would live, and the poor would die (Bahamian folk song) Darren Grem wrote The Business of Blessing before Donald Trump’s stunning electoral triumph, but the book helps explain the…

If you have seen Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, it’s hard to hear Luke’s Christmas story without thinking of the “baby Jesus grace.”  Ricky Bobby is a driver not a thinker, and it shows. “Dear lord…

The election is over and the season of recrimination begins. Donald Trump will be president, some say, because rural white America is a sinkhole of fundamentalist racism. Others blame the outcome on the aloof arrogance of a latte-swilling “coastal elite”…