In Her 4.5 billion years of being a planet, Earth has known great drama illustrated in superfluous gestures of creativity and supreme acts of destruction. If we used only this as our backdrop for religion what would our religion consist of?
I think that that the apostle Paul has gotten an undeserved bum rap by many progressives and that it is good, right, and well for Christian pastors to preach from the letters of the apostle Paul.
Could it be, as some psychologists suggest, that ‘pure’ altruism doesn’t exist? According to them, when we help strangers, there is always some benefit to us personally, even if we’re not aware of it. This could include gaining respect from others, helping us feel good about ourselves, or for some Christians it could increase our chances of getting into heaven.
My perspective is that I am a Christian, who believes I must examine political and economic decisions in the light of those values. The basis upon which I make political and economic judgments is that I believe every person, rich and poor, Anglo-Saxon and African, Hispanic and Asian, male and female, gay and straight must to be treated with the dignity of being a child of God.
Over three weeks before the first rocket was fired from Gaza, and war erupted yet again between Israel and Palestine, something happened that was hardly mentioned in the press, but explains so much of the terror and humiliation that Palestinians face every day from Israel.
In this moment of history everything has changed. Over the course of a few months, most of us went from living hybrid virtual lives to almost completely virtual lives. Church services moved online for both megachurches and churches of twelve, giving equal access to the masses to churches, regardless of their size.
Might the global coronavirus emergency we are living through prove to be a kind of shamanistic initiation that is meant to wake us up as a species? Is facing climate change and extinction another such initiation? What are the most essential shifts in consciousness that our species must undergo if we are to survive?
In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1945 that the Western world was on the precipice of a new era, an era without religion. God, as the “answer” to unsolvable questions, was continually being put out of a job as science continually extended the boundaries of human knowledge.
I think about Mother Mary and her pride alongside her anguish as her son became more and more himself. A self that threatened the powers that be. A self that would hang for being who he was. What must she have felt when he told her, I must go out into the world and share these teachings. I must share with the world this great love I have experienced.
Like many, I grew up in a two-tier universe. The lower natural tier was physical, temporal, and ever-changing. The higher supernatural tier was spiritual, eternal, and changeless. God, the Holy Spirit, and human souls or spirits were in the higher tier. Human bodies, all nonhuman creatures, and all matter and energy were in the lower tier.