We sat in the sunken courtyard of the United University Church at USC in Los Angeles yesterday, basking in the sun under a bough of carmine bougainvillea, noshing on a delicious lunch of kichari dosed with almond dressing served outdoors by our Good Karma Cafe. “Since giving up God, I enjoy things for themselves, in the moment, more than ever. Not thinking about the biblical past or about a future eschaton frees me up to enjoy this food, here and... Read more
Beginning Again Well here I am. I am stuck in the middle. The middle of Lent. And I am waiting. And I am tired of it. And I am tired of thinking about it. And I am tired of writing about it. Lent schment. Is it Easter yet? Last week I tried to force Easter to come early. And there for about a minute I thought I had succeeded. It was Spring Break, which is practically an official holiday, which... Read more
What is God like? What are humans like? When it comes to the Atonement, those two questions guide all of our other questions. They are the two implicit questions behind N.T. Wright’s comments about the Atonement in the video below. For example, Wright says: “Tragically, some Christians have said that on the cross God embraced the use of violence to solve the problems, therefore this legitimates us in embracing violence…and I want to say, ‘Excuse me. You’re just not reading... Read more
By J. Dana Trent Author, Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk Deep-Fried Faith Four years ago, I spent Shrove Tuesday eating my weight in sausage patties and golden pancakes. Then I became a vegetarian for Lent. My first vegetarian Ash Wednesday was met with nausea and a keen sense of the 40 days until Easter breakfast casseroles. Lent was about joining Jesus in the wilderness, but it was also about surviving a... Read more
One of the issues facing our understanding of the crucifixion event centers on who to blame for the wickedness on display. One popular view is presented by people called “Calvinists” who tend to emphasize the sovereignty or power of God, and the depravity or wickedness of humanity. Calvinists are followers of a famous 16th century reformer in Geneva named John Calvin, who wrote one of the most eloquent summaries of Reformation theology entitled, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. In it, Calvin... Read more
This is the fourth in a series of posts where I re-imagine Jesus’ five big sermons as TED Talks, in which he Educates people in God’s new Design for a world that runs on the Technology called love. This post is an interpretive paraphrase of Matthew 18. ——————————————————————- I was recently asked: “In this new world God is building, who’s in charge?” To answer that, I need some audience participation. I need help from a kid… You… Yes, you, can you come up here a minute?…Hello, dear one, what’s your... Read more
Once upon a time I coveted a house and twenty acres. But it was no use. Both Jesus and I could see straight through the flimsy tissue-paper heart of my prayers. Read more
“Once a person begins to desire what the model desires, he learns very quickly that disclosing the desire – naming it, speaking it – is the shortest route to making certain that he will never obtain the object. In this situation only dissimulation will succeed, and the best way to dissimulate is to say the opposite of what one means.” Jeremiah Alberg, Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses: Reading Scandalous Texts Everyone lies. We tell little lies all the... Read more
If Job was right in that he didn’t deserve all the horrible things that happened to him, then why did Job suffer? Read more
I became aware of my trust in God when I was thirteen, during an overnight with the daughter of our church’s minister. We weren’t in the same school, but that year her dad taught our confirmation class and we became friends. We had turned the lights out—her mother had asked us to—but, as usual, we continued talking. Eventually, the conversation took a turn when one of us asked, “What if God didn’t exist?” My memory is that two things happened... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In