In a recent article in Politico, Joshua Zeitz begins with the decision of 400 Methodist churches in Texas alone to leave their parent denomination, The United Methodist Church, to join the new, more conservative Global Methodist Church. This reflects the…
Jesus and Buddha are talking with me about loving and blessing my enemies
I seem to have a larger list of enemies these days, those I find it harder to love and bless. But Jesus is insistent about how we relate to our enemies: “You have heard it was said ‘You shall love…
All I want for Christmas is a little less schadenfreude and a little more freudenfreude
My worst course in college was German; thank God I needed only four semesters to graduate. But I am too well acquainted with the German word that describes a malady of the spirit, schadenfreude, our joy at another’s misfortune. It…
Salvation as deliverance and blessing: Moving from Thanksgiving through Advent to Christmas
It was the Old Testament theologian Claus Westermann who startled me years ago by talking about the two ways God saves in the Bible: salvation as deliverance and salvation as blessing. Most theologians and preachers focus on salvation as deliverance,…
What do we need in this time of apostasy? Revolutionary patience
We are living in a time of apostasy. We might call it the American Captivity of the Church, or of at least of an appallingly large segment of the American church. It has abandoned the heart of Christianity and obscured…
The church in America needs to recover its balance
Have you ever been walking along and lost your balance, one part of the body out of sync with the other parts, and you weren’t sure where you might land? The church in America is there. The lack of balance…
Buttrick and Buechner in the balcony of heaven
It was Carlyle Marney, I think, who first named our personal saints in the “great cloud of witnesses” as those in “the balcony of heaven.” On the occasion of the death of Frederick Buechner, I offer these memories of the…
Is there a balm in Gilead? The church in post-Roe America
The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah cried out on behalf of his people and nation. It was wracked by rampant greed and deceit, and the lives of the poor were being trampled upon. “Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no…
Have the fundamentalists won? And the future of liberal Christianity
One hundred years ago, May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached his most famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He was at the time the preaching minister of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. The Presbyterian denomination along…