Today’s “Ask a Progressive Christian” with ProgressiveChristianity.org Board Member Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin Q: Is the Bible the Inerrant Word of God?
We have to really think like human beings. And, just accept the reality of now.
The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity.
A month's worth of practices to explore the many moods and meanings of winter, including its pristine beauty and its many opportunities for playfulness.
The great Christian monk Thomas Merton once compared the spiritual life to the search for a path in a field of untrodden snow: "Walk across the snow and there is your path."
This collection of 200 dialogue and dialogue-related quotations is gathered from a wide range of sources – ancient and modern.
Each day you will receive a different email message from this enlightened hot mind. Every day the one who is eternally alive will throw a ray of his light into the depths of your life. Every day a different facet of the comprehensive revelation I have described will flash its brilliance into your soul.
When we are mindful, we will not only see the true outcomes and impact of behavior that is not kind compared to behavior that is kind, but that knowledge will be present with us in each moment guiding our every action.
The whole message of the Christian Scripture is based in the idea of metanoia,
Christianity has a long history of oppressing women, but the Easter story shows us how inauthentic that is to the Gospel.
The gnostic understands Christ's message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching
Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion - which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will - from their own
Traditional Christianity has missed the point of the Easter story. The miracle on Easter wasn’t that Jesus was physically or spiritually raised to sit at God’s right hand until he could one day return to judge humanity. The miracle was his followers recognizing that they could continue to proclaim the message of God’s Reign on this earth even once Jesus had been crucified.
Our Earth is sacred and does not belong to us. When we recognize that we are merely stewards of creation which has been entrusted to our care, it shifts our outlook. We cannot continue to ravage the earth, deplete its resources, and consume without restraint while claiming to be faithful to our God. The Gospel is one of interdependence. All of creation is woven together in a delicate web that we must nurture faithfully.
It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.” Mark 14:1-2.
That is precisely when we recognize our common humanity
Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspirations and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.
"Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person... May you experience this vast, expansive, infinity indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins."
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.
And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of it…all of it is completely worth it.
I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.
Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves--a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that's God, for others it's nature, art, or even human soulfulness.
"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-lief. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."
"Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstances whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else."
“The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.”
If there is any one message the Bible delivers, it is the message that God loves outcasts and that Jesus was born into the world an outcast to rescue and renew outcasts from religion gone bad. He was born poor and died poor, yet the legacy of love he left us, the legacy of inclusion and acceptance and understanding, will endure forever.
God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit.
When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture.