Life

What is the most important goal of your spiritual formation? You might instinctively say love. Learning to love, practicing love. Good answer, but until we carefully define it, love may not help direct us. Rather than a feeling or behavior, love

If I asked you who you are, how would you answer? Almost everyone I’ve asked, including myself, has answered with a mix of the roles they fill, the accomplishments they’ve accumulated, and the attributes they exhibit. Roles, accomplishments, and attributes describe

Two events converged in my mind last week. My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we’d been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary

Our English words patriarchal and paternal descend from the Latin word pater, father. We know about patriarchy—society organized around male domination, often to the point of excluding women—but paternalism is restricting the freedom and autonomy of others under the guise

The most damaging attitude toward life and spirituality is…wait for it…passivity. Passive people feel their actions are insufficient or that they have no real choice at all, which makes them victims—defined by choicelessness. Victims are always waiting, never in the present,

We’re back in count again. We just finished counting forty days of Lent, and now we’re counting again. The count of Lent signifies a time of preparation for Easter, and the count now is also preparation for a second liberation on

Cross and resurrection form the crux of Christian tradition, but whatever these events were historically, if we merely revere them from a distance of two millennia, we are missing the point of the gospels. These events realigned every detail of

Very few of us live in the real world. Like avatars in a gamescape, we live in a world created by our own thought patterns, which are in turn created by our core beliefs—deeply held, fundamental assumptions about ourselves, others, and

Just when you think the world can’t get any crazier, each week we get a whole new view of crazy. And the more the world pounds on our door through news and social media, the more our grip on spiritual

Burning bush is our cultural meme, idiom for a peak experience, a vision of God or from God. But for all its power, one burning bush is not enough. Standing on holy ground in front of the original burning bush, Moses