5 days ago · O ne of the most dangerous aspects of religion is the willingness of some of its adherents to imagine that they can grasp the fullness of God and understand how, where, when and why God acts in human affairs.. Ever since Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt while campaigning last year in Pennsylvania, lots of people have declared that he survived only because God intervened so that ...

Jan 1, 2025 · A few weeks ago here on the blog, I wrote about the difference between "private religion" and more communal approaches to being part of a faith tradition.. I invited readers to respond with their experiences of one kind of faith or the other. Today, to start out a brand new year, I want to share a couple of responses to that post because I thought they were insightful for me and might be for ...

1 day ago · I f, like many Americans today, you are feeling distress and angst about the moral quality of our elected leadership, perhaps you need a model from the recent past to remind you that the United States has had some moral and ethical giants in office.. The late John Lewis, a former congressman from Georgia and a civil rights leader whose nonviolent approach nearly cost him his life several times ...

Dec 18, 2024 · As we move to the end of a remarkable year that has been challenging in countless of ways, I've been thinking about the big picture.You know, an eternal view. A cosmic sense of things. It's been one way to reconvince myself that I cannot, individually, change everything I want to change in the world -- from ending wars to stopping crime to …

Jan 20, 2024 · E very human being at some point experiences pain, grief, catastrophe, loss. In fact, I wrote about a few examples in my own life in my most recent blog post here.. The ultimate question is how we respond to disasters so they don't irrevocably break us.

Feb 3, 2024 · Nashville, Tenn., and Delavan, Ill. -- I've double-datelined this piece because I want to tell you two interrelated family stories that are rooted in faithful living. Recently my wife Marcia and I drove to Nashville to celebrate the 19th birthday...

Jan 8, 2025 · I n this blog post last weekend, I introduced you briefly to a new book about the murder of a journalist in India and about India's increasingly autocratic, self-certain and frightening government.. I return to that book again today to raise the question of the purposes of religion. In the context of the book, I Am on the Hit List, author Rollo Romig offers many examples of how false religious ...

Jan 1, 2024 · F or well over 50 years, the story about the decline in religious participation in the U.S. has been followed, told and retold. And it's an intriguing phenomenon with many ramifications. But a story that gets told less often is about how people committed to a particular faith tradition can -- and sometimes do -- take actions that are radically contrary to the teachings of that tradition.

Nov 20, 2024 · O ne of the intriguing results of the recent presidential election was the voter turnout, which was down more than 8.5 million votes compared with turnout in 2020.. As I write this, the turnout this year as counted so far was just under 147 million compared with the 2020 turnout of about 155.5 million.. What happened? Lots of theories, some of which make sense.

Dec 28, 2024 · P atriotism, meaning a commitment to one's country, is quite different from a commitment to one's faith tradition. But they share at least this in common: Both require an unswerving willingness to speak the truth, to question and challenge policies and actions that seem destructive and to know not only what you stand for …