Yesterday Kay Stewart shared this poem at the cemetery as we laid to rest the ashes of her first-born daughter Katherine (“Katie”). Yesterday Kay Stewart shared this at the c ...

God never was only the words he utters, or the ones we utter about God — just like we are never the sum total of everything we have spoken or what has been spoken of us. There is so much more to the mystery of ...

Uncertainty about the existence of God is not the same thing as certainty about the non-existence of God. Uncertainty about the existence of God is not the same thing as certainty ...

Maybe what I appreciate most about this book is the sense of wonder it provides. The book and our conversations have reminded me that nothing simply “is what it is.” (The Contr ...

Julie Polter Those who study together can also change together. Here are our recommendations for good books, videos, and online resources ...

Why does Rob write this stuff? Whose side is he on? Yours. Mine. Ours. It's the Monday after Easter, and I couldn't think of a better day to talk about God being with us ...

The difference between logical necessities or physical necessities and vital necessities is made clear in that in the latter we have the possibility of refusing ‘to turn away from a disaster’ – we can in fact ...

What I think Rob Bell is doing is not so much giving us new ideas (though, given some of the ecclesial silos many of us have been reared in some of these ideas might seem new). Instead, Rob is lending his voic ...

I love Peter Rollins' honesty about his dark night of the soul. He's popularized a term for the intellectual position accompanying the dark night of the soul: a/theism. I interpret Peter's thoug ...

As the names of those who died are made known, that cry is followed by a question: Why? Why does God allow evil? “Oh, God!” That cry has echoed ever since news of the horri ...

Thinking like that of Gov. Huckabee suggests that we somehow have the power to remove God from our schools and our society. This kind of God is quite small, weak, and impotent — one that is dictated by the me ...

Advent suggests so many mysteries of God's patience. One rarely commented case is God as Father and embryo. It is extra Biblical so imagination can only begin to tell the bizarre tale. ...

Up-and-coming singer-songwriter Noah Gundersen stopped by the Sojourners office to talk with our Brandon Hook about music, his new album Family, God, and creativity. The Seattle-based folk artist was recently ...

Thanksgiving Day keeps coming around, keeps reminding us of what could be, keeps giving us tastes of what God wants for us. Thanksgiving Day speaks the bold truth that God isn't done with us. A world of w ...

To rejoice in not being God means to rejoice in being ourselves. To accept that we are not God is to accept our imperfection. How is it possible that the creative life can feel si ...

Life of Pi, adapted from Yann Martel’s moving book, takes on massive questions — who is God, how do we find God, and why do bad things happen to us — as we follow Pi, a zookeeper’s son shipwrecked on a lifeboa ...

"It changed him," Bono said of St. Ignatius and his conversion experience. "It forced him out of bed and into the world. And that's what I'm hoping happens here in Georgetown with you. ...

Today's awesome links! Ever wonder what other people look like when they turn the corner in a haunted house and — BOOM — out of nowhere comes that one guy dressed in a su ...

What do you have to say about "living abundantly"? How do you deal with anxiety when you think about the future of churches? What do you have to say about "living ...

How often, like the disciples, do the times of cowardice, boasting, and fear come from the fact that we don’t know or don’t believe that, like a child in the lap of God, there simply is no longer any basis for ...

Yet, as Gregory A. Boyd notes in his important book The Myth of a Christian Nation, taking America BACK for God assumes we were at one really belonged to God, followed God, listened to God. Boyd goes on to ask ...

Cheerleaders at an East Texas high school are fighting their school district’s orders to stop using Bible quotes on their signs at football games. Cheerleaders at an East Texas hi ...

Good and gracious God, Today we come before you with heavy hearts as we remember the events of 9/11. Good and gracious God, Today we come before you with heavy hearts as we ...

“There are thousands of stories from 9/11. Some are stories of pain and survival. Many are stories of heroism. Mine is a story of faith.” For John Mahony, a retired U.S. Army colo ...

While watching the replayed video of the plane colliding with the first tower, the second tower attack came. And then there were the reports of similar attacks at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. At that mome ...

On the heels of the Republican National Convention, where the shadow of the Religious Right still ominously looms, it was notable that the Democratic National Convention opened with a debate over the absence o ...

UDATE: (Posted 9/6/12) Criticized by Republicans and some members of their own party, Democrats voted to restore the word “God” to the Democratic national platform late Wednesday (Sept. 5). The GOP had seized ...

So this "soul" that we speak of — this part of our selves that isn't grounded in physical being but is spiritual (whatever that means) that we expect or hope will live on after our mortal coils ...

God is bigger than the craft that is religion. God is not what we do. Nor is God some Collective Self. God is more than we can contain in even our most imaginative moments. God is more than the people who have ...

I do not want to go back to Church because life outside of Church is better. It just is. There's no dogma complicating the path to God. It is more than refreshing to escape the games church-folk play with ...

"I am a flawed person. I should not be allowed to be here talking to you. But you know what? That's the God we're dealing with, people." ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber to the 2012 ELCA Youth Gathering ...

Herod was trapped in his own story and it feels to me like it’s a story that tortured him, one from which he felt there was no escape. When our own little stories begin to feel self-contained and inescapable, ...

Good and gracious God: Today, like the rest of the world, when I woke I wrapped myself in myths. They are comfortable and warming in what can seem like such a cold world. Yes, they are old and worn but they ...

I lost my joy. I suspect there are a few of you who feel the same way. Not that you aren't happy, but there is this deep place of celebratory joy which you once knew that really doesn't come around m ...

One-hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt pressed for a national health care program — the Supreme Court has levied its judgment: States can opt out, but they cannot prevent the nation from offering its citizens ...

Peace is better than war. Good of the whole is better than whims of a few. God wants everybody — red, yellow, black, brown and white taken care of. God wants true community, more togetherness … not more separa ...

I knew I was cynical, but I didn’t know I was about to die from my cynicism. Then I went to the Wild Goose Festival. I wasn’t healed there. Just the opposite. I was playfully wooed to mourn the passing of my y ...

Arloa Sutter didn’t know what she was doing, but she did it anyways. I love gutsy people like that. I want to tell you the story of one brave woman who has given her life to live ...

Because now, according to this version of what the story is about, every person born after that inherited original sin from Eve. That’s right. Eve messed it up for everyone by eating some piece of fruit God to ...

Author Anne Lamott, one of our favorite Jesus-loving subversives, recently delivered the undergraduate and interdisciplinary studies commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley. ...

Faith is an orientation toward something rather than an arrival at it. Faith is a daily practice, not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Yet we continue to try to define God, faith and the Bible on our own terms ...

It is not the imperfection or presence of conflict themselves within the Communion of the Saints that too many of those who would not call themselves Christians find repellent. It is how the church deals with ...

So I want to speak directly to you about the vocation of the church in the world. Let me start with a baseball story. I have been a Little League baseball coach for both my son’s teams over many years. And I’ ...

“Get working on your prayer life,” I told myself. I knew what made my mother who she was. She was close to very few people. But she was close to God. Whatever character defects my mother started out with, the ...

To believe is easy. You can fill stadiums with people wanting to believe, either to solidify what they already think or to grasp hold of something because they feel cast adrift and lost at sea. To doubt, to in ...

This weekend, if you can believe it, marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King trial that acquitted four police officers of any wrong doing. Maybe some of ...

In a video address Tuesday, President Obama told hundreds of young evangelical Christian leaders gathered at the Q Conference in Washington, D.C., that they had a partner in the White House in their humanitari ...

Faith alone offers no guarantees. Faith is not the proof of our beliefs, but rather the hope that what we choose to believe in is right. While the proven theories in life can only extend to a given limit, the ...

I stood in the middle of a valley. Hot wind whipped the sand at my feet. Dry bones, bleached by the sun covered the valley floor. Son of man, God said, can these bones live? It ...

A note from the poet: Two years ago, our church opened its doors and began serving meals to our community. The immense and overwhelming feelings I felt scared me and so I penned them in this poem. Working with ...