(This is Part 3 of a 3-part series. See Part 1 and Part 2) OFFENSE Jesus was most recently portrayed in celluloid form by a Portuguese model with great hair. I’m talking about The Bible, a miniserie...Read More
(This is Part 2 of a 3-part series. See Part 1 here.) AUTHORITY There is another hot issue in a discussion about religion and the Bible: the question of who has authority over the tellin...Read More
Winter is loitering in Minnesota this year, even though we’ve asked it to move along. Last Thursday brought a half-foot of snow, and April 19th achieved a record low of 21 degrees before the sun ca...Read More
It has been a tough week to be in Boston. It is almost as hard to add anything to all that has been written about the tragedy, confusion, and sadness that the week brought to Boston and to the world...Read More
This week, we are once again reading Parashat Kedoshim (Leviticus 19:1-20:27). Biblical scholars commonly refer to these two chapters of Leviticus as the holiness code due to the numerous interpersona...Read More
My Christian friend LeeAnne got the conversation about Faithful Advocacy started by reflecting on a passage from the Gospel of John: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to...Read More
A few weeks ago I was sitting in a preaching workshop listening to a series of sermons on the same text. Most of the sermons were a lot alike, but one of them was a little different. It was about a ce...Read More
The 16th Street Baptist Church sits in the middle of downtown Birmingham, Alabama. During the heart of the Civil Rights movement, when Birmingham was known across the nation as “Bombingham,” march...Read More
I attended the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. I was amazed by the preponderance of sacred fashion statements (the hats!), the number of New Age practitioners from ...Read More
The Freudian take on religion, that it is all about sex, or more precisely all about repressed sexual urges, is hardly new. Nevertheless, it was somewhat startling when renowned sociologist of relig...Read More