Progressing Spirit

“OK, Guru-boy. If There’s No Original Sin and Hell, Why Be a Christian?”

Column by Rev. David M. Felten on September, 1 2022

Earlier this summer, I was called out as a heretic and accused of “sitting on Satan’s lap” courtesy of the Institute for Religion and Democracy (the fundamentalist think tank behind the schisms of many of our mainline denominations).

How is it best to gently question the behavior of a new pastor who seems to be fundamentalist in her thinking and does not …

Answered by Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers

The Mother Religion

Column by Rev. Lauren Van Ham on July, 8 2021

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?

Is the Church ever going to address the antisemitism in our liturgy? The Jew hating is both blatant and subtle in the scriptures we read from Mark, Matthew, …

Answered by Rev. Roger Wolsey

Column by Joran Slane Oppelt on June, 21 2018

Why are we here? How did we come to be? What is our relationship to the force that created us? What is our relationship to the environment and to the other creatures on Earth? Does man exercise free will? Why is life full of suffering? Where is the line between right and wrong, guilt and innocence, damnation and salvation? For Jews and Christians, these questions (and more) are first posed in that short, simple story.

I was raised in the Bible Belt as a Southern Baptist (shudder). I have attended may different types of churches in my life and have always likened myself …

Answered by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

Column by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox on December, 28 2017

In dark times like ours one takes delight in those who are still committed to a search for truth and are still busy hunting gathering for what matters. We are blessed still with such figures in our midst and I want to celebrate two in this essay. One, a citizen of Toronto and of Canada, Naomi Klein, described herself by phone one day to me as “Jewish, Feminist and Atheist.” She is a profound author, social activist and filmmaker. The other, Scott Russell Sanders, celebrates his small town existence in Methodist rooted rural Ohio and on this planet and in this universe in a number of wonderful books. The former’s two recent books, Capitalism vs. The Climate and No Is Not Enough, are as on target to our troubled times as any I know; and Sanders book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, complements Klein’s in a profoundly mystical way.