Leadership is a privilege. It is not a right. I wonder when we will get that through our thick skulls. Jesus said rather plainly, “To whom much is given, much is required,” which underlines the differentiated, increased expectations that come…
Putin needs to be taken down
Someone needs to take down Vladimir Putin. Last week’s brazen attack on a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine, is only the latest in a year’s worth of horrifying atrocities set in motion by one man alone — Putin. And for…
The evil that men do
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the Bard suggests that the memories of greatness or good someone has done fade from view far sooner than do the effects of evil done by the same person: “The evil that men do lives after…
How Putin’s picture in a fictitious dictionary challenges all of us
Do you remember your child’s pictorial dictionary? The very first ones contain images of people, places or things that can be named: girl, father, doctor, astronaut, church, mountain, house, playground, ball, hat, Teddy bear, night light. Picture dictionaries for older…
Two kinds of people see good and evil two kinds of ways
It turns out that once again, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe most everything can be classified easily as good or evil, and those who believe it’s not that simple. Pew Research reports that…
Pew study offers some surprising insights to American views on suffering, salvation, heaven and hell
New research on American beliefs about some of faith’s hardest questions highlights both the nation’s biblical illiteracy and the chasm between what various Christian traditions teach. And it holds a few surprises about how people in the pew actually believe…
Booing Trump felt good, momentarily: the hidden danger of giving undue attention to evil
The common exhortation of “Don’t look away” reminds us that a lack of vigilance can make us oblivious to the ways in which our political environment can change us for the worse. But an ironic danger lurks beneath the surface.
Silence in the face of evil: learning from an obscure schoolteacher who urged Karl Barth and other theologians to stand in solidarity with the Jews in Nazi Germany
If I thought Nazi-era Germany was an aberration I could probably move on; but in Donald Trump’s America, who can think that? The Church of Jesus Christ is confronted by an anti-Gospel once again. The German Church never acknowledged her complicity with the National Socialists, and the white churches of America are equally resistant to truth.
Nonviolence and a different future with God
“Deliver us from evil.” Most Sundays we pray these words, but rarely do they sound the resonance we hear in these anarchic days. Evil seems unrelenting, incapable of exhausting its ravenous power. Who can withstand its voracious appetite for destruction?