The first Easter sermon was delivered by women, and the men who heard it decided it was nonsense.

Luke doesn't soften this. He tells us the women came back from the tomb with the news that would become the center of everything Christians believe today, and "the story sounded like nonsense to the m...

We often refer to the strange act of boiling frogs to describe how to change something slowly. The idea referenced is that you can boil a frog as long as you do it slowly rather than all at once. Like many things I learned as a kid, this one doesn't hold up. Real frogs become increasingly agitated a...

The most-cited proof that America was founded as a Christian nation traces back to a single paper written in 1984. It turns out the author of that paper said the opposite.

There is a claim circulating in Christian nationalist circles that has been repeated so many times by so many prominent people ...

I'm sometimes asked why my theology sounds political. The assumption being that theology and politics are two separate areas and are better off in their respective corners. Except theology has never worked like that.

We often try to "spiritualize" stories and narratives so that we can separate theo...

We're fresh off celebrating the resurrection of Jesus this past weekend. I shared a message on the question the angels ask at the tomb: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). A lot of people are looking in the wrong places for God to move these days. As I reflect on the state ...

My friend Andrew DeCort recently wrote an article in which he used the phrase "the trauma of survival." He was writing about the attacks on Iran and our country's obsession with power over others through violence. Here was the sentence in which the phrase jumped out to me:

The dear people of Iran

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There's a significant difference between a cross on a shield, a cross hanging on the wall, and a real-life cross used for crucifixion. The first is an image to rally a fight, the second is an image to provide comfort, and the third is an instrument of suffering. And it turns out that the way we see ...

The name John Piper has, for years, been entwined with deeply conservative Christian theology and practice. He's an eighty-year-old Reformed Baptist theologian at the opposite end of the spectrum from me both theologically and in practice. I once quoted him in a positive way, and it literally snowed...

Is the Church more like a team, or a family?

If your church experiences have been similar to mine, you've likely heard far more talk of the church as a family. It implies something holistic, that we are together in a deeper sense. Especially when used in terms of salvation and inclusion, this image...

Adam Serwer recently coined the term neighborism to describe "a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from." It stems from the beautiful resistance we've seen in Minneapolis in response to the horrific othering of our government against vulnerable ...