I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.
The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.
Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.
Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of – or perhaps better, because of – the world’s fragmentation and divisions.
I am not sure how old I was when I began to worry about being saved, but it was sometime in my early teens.
Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.
Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.
At least one reason for trying to live lives that make a difference is that by so living, we hope we will not be forgotten by those who benefit from our trying to make a difference. Yet to try to insure we will not be forgotten too often results in desperate manipulative strategies that are doomed to fail.
I was named Stanley because the week before I was born, my mother and father saw a movie – ‘Stanley and Livingstone.’
Undergraduate life on college campuses tends in the direction of neopagan excess.
I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are.
‘It is finished’ will not be, as we know from the tradition of the ordering of these words from the cross, the last words of Jesus. ‘It is finished’ is a cry of victory.
Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.
Let us wait in patience for the Christ-child whose own life depended on the lives of Mary and Joseph. The Word of God was made flesh. He came so that we might experience the fullness of time.
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.
American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.
To be a Christian is to be obligated to be charitable. This is true whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished.
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