Original Sin or Original Reptile? Once upon a reptile, a very long, long time ago in a place not so far away, the human story began. After much fighting for survival, Homo Sapiens came out the …

Secular Consumerists (aka Secular Humanists) have made a cottage industry of bashing the belief system of totally innocuous and even quite benevolent people and they enjoy gleefully pointing to things like the Crusades, the Inquisition or the 30 Years War to, basically, say that Christianity sucks. They feel the Christian religion is impugned by such atrocities.

A sermon preached on the Second Sunday after Christmas – the readings for this sermon include: John 1:1-9, The Gospel of Thomas 70; Matthew 2:1-12.

If we pay attention, the Christmas story is a mirror held up for us to see that we live in a country where the government locks thousands of migrant children into dog cages, sexually abusing some, torturing others, and allowing many to die while the church is largely compliant and silent. And we seriously wonder if this government might actually win election approval from poor church goers in a few months. Merry Christmas?

It is Written in The Message, Ephesians Chapter 1, that Christ rules the Universe, all of it, from galaxies to governments, no one exempt from His power, He has the final say on all things. I have been trying to reconcile this for two years, to understand if this is a metaphor or actual truth, what is your perception?

I want to give some thought to one of the most often invoked rituals in Christian and secular circles, namely giving of thanks. Thanksgiving, depending on the bible translation, is used about thirty-five times in the bible. The word “thanks” counts over a hundred times. Thank, thanked, thanking, thankful, thankfulness and thankworthy, all are used in some translation of the bible.

The story should be approached more carefully in order to capture its spirit, its “message,” and less doctrinally. Though we have come to celebrate this gem as a—perhaps the–Christmas story, I’d urge us progressives to put aside the story’s Christian provenance while still admiring its central, its deeply humane affirmation. And we should above all appreciate the profoundly secular arena in which it plays out.

Today: the Feast of St. Nicholas, the ancient precursor to the modern Santa Claus, will pass without much ado. Some will try to encourage us to resurrect St. Nicholas to save us all from Santa’s powers for we have gone astray. To those well meaning souls who would rid Christmas of its flagrant consumerism, I can only offer up a feeble, “Baa Humbug!”

It’s fair to say that two points of view concerning the life and death of Jesus developed early within Christianity. One was carried by the Christian West and is still prominent in the West today. The other was carried by the Christian East and may not be as well known to a lot of Western Christians.

My friend, Aria Nostic (self-proclaimed agnostic, if not atheistic) asked me how I pray to God, if God is not a personal god. “We know there is no supernatural god in heaven intervening in nature and human affairs.”

The Christmas message therefore, is not for the Wall Street billionaires and department store owners. It’s not for powerful politicians or military leaders. Rather, Christmas is for the working poor, the disenfranchised, the homeless, and the teenage single mom who chose to keep her baby and is struggling to finish school so she can support her child.

  Honest to Goodness proposes a new Christian presence that is free of dogmatism, exclusivism, and biblicism. It charts a way back to the spiritual and ethical revolution begun by Jesus of Nazareth, one that can make …

What happens when a former Zen Buddhist monk and his feminist wife experience an apparition of the Virgin Mary?

“This book could not have come at a more auspicious time, and the message is mystical perfection, not to mention a courageous one. I adore this book.”—Caroline Myss, author of “Anatomy of the Spirit”

A people’s spirituality derives, slowly, in association with their daily perceptions, feelings, reflections, occupations and actions. And from time to time we assess who we are in this process.

It is commonly assumed that Jesus had 12 male disciples, the number being fashioned after the 12 tribes of Israel. Whether or not there were 12 tribes named after 12 men is a question for next week. The question for today is: did Jesus have women disciples, and who were they?

In his book Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, Fox set out to find a way for today’s spiritual seekers to understand Aquinas whose works, set in a scholastic mode of learning, often prove difficult for contemporary minds to cipher.

The Peoples’ Bible highlights the role of cultures in shaping the Bible and the way people read the Bible today. Relying on the best insights of historical-critical, liberationist, postmodern, and postcolonial interpretation the contributors include the editors of the volume plus Kosuke Koyama, Randall C. Bailey, Fernando
F. Segovia, Elsa Tamez, Clarice Martin, Hee An Choi, Gale A. Yee, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, and many more.

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities.