The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.
Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die.
William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.
The idea is that Jesus overcame death through the Resurrection. What that does is fail to appreciate the fact that the resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ. It's not like, 'Oh, that was just a mistake, now it's over.' Jesus continues to suffer from our sins.
Being a Christian has not and does not come naturally or easy for me. I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.
I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought.
When I started to write 'Hannah's Child,' I realized that this had to be a book of passion, to have a certain kind of vulnerability. I think that people respond to that.
To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.
The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.
The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.
To be a Christian means you become a part of the most significant story the world has ever heard. You don't become part of that without an ongoing questioning of what it means to become part of that.
Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.
The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God's creatures is not clear.
The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual.
Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.
Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.
The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible.
