Sublime

If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.

this drive into pastoral personality is connected with the conception that nature is impersonal, as we saw above, divine action becomes much fuzzier and faith more fragile for the pastor and her people alike.

That could be a parable. It’s tragic, it’s painful. I think back on my own life and I think, Why did I waste it? I wasted it. And all kinds of wonderful things, believe me—pastoral ministries, theological enterprises, liturgical services, etc., etc., etc. The more occupied we are in the things of God, the more likely we priests are to forget what G

There are folks who, at great cost, just by insisting on existence and self-definition, have created more room for the rest of us to be expansive and self-determined in our identities and relationships. We owe a debt to those who have challenged the norms our culture has defined for us—norms that limit who we can be, how we present ourselves, how w

But this prodding would no longer come from a set-apart holy man, consecrated by enchanted oil or a Yale degree. Rather, Henry’s prodding was done as “one of us.” Henry threw off any sense that he was a class above or beyond, as so many clergy embodied.

“Evangelicals?”

I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy.

And that essential mistake that mankind has enshrined is the fiction of an independent self—a self over all, over nature, over groups that we marginalize, over the partners and children we crazily try to control, over the neighbors with whom we compete, over the planet we disrespect. That is our potentially fatal error. We will awaken, or we will h

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.