Don't Tell Them Anything They'll Need to Unlearn
Our children deserve to know the stories that matter to us. So tell them the stories of your tradition --and of other traditions, when appropriate.
Personal Religion Archives
December 6, 2006 5:40 PM
Comments (104)January 5, 2007 10:48 AM
Mystical Experiences of God
My most formative religious experiences were a series of mystical experiences. They began to occur in my early thirties. They changed my understanding of the meaning of the word “God”-of what that word points to-and gave me an unshakable conviction that God (or “the sacred”) is real and can be experienced.
February 2, 2007 10:07 AM
Prayer Transforms Us
I pray all the time. I do not mean “every minute,” but many times a day.
February 15, 2007 9:30 AM
Sex Can Be Sacramental
Sex is seen as sacred or sinful perhaps for the same reason. Sex has power. Of course, not all sex does. There is great sex, mediocre sex, and bad sex, just as there is great music, mediocre music, and bad music.
April 7, 2007 10:55 AM
Easter About Life, not Death
As I understand Easter, to the extent that Easter can be understood, it is not about something happening to the corpse of Jesus, but about the continuing experience of Jesus among his followers after his death.
April 17, 2007 11:31 AM
God Provides, Doesn't Protect
I believe that God is present everywhere, in everything - that the universe is shot through with the radiant presence of God. Thus we are always "in God," even as God is more than the universe.
April 28, 2007 6:44 AM
Repent and Return to God
The biblical meaning of "repentance" is quite different from an apology. In the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament, "repentance" means "to return" - that is, to return from exile, to return to life in the presence of God, to a life centered in God.
June 14, 2007 9:50 AM
Blind Acceptance is Idolatry
Without questioning, faith is idolatrous. Just as patriotism without questioning risks becoming idolatrous nationalism, so faith without questioning risks becoming idolatrous religion.
To explain: when faith is defined as unquestioning acceptance of “tenets or traditions,” whether drawn from the Bible or doctrine or both, then the object of faith is no longer God, but the tenets and traditions themselves. Something other than God has been given an absolute status – which is what makes it idolatrous.
October 10, 2007 8:06 AM
Agnostic About the Afterlife
I am a committed Christian and a complete agnostic about the afterlife. I use “agnostic” in its precise sense: one who does not know. Moreover, I know that I cannot resolve “not knowing” by “believing” – whatever we believe about an afterlife has nothing to do with whether there is one or what it is like.
There is more to say. I think that conventional Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife for many centuries is one of its negative features. I have often said that if I were to make a list of Christianity’s ten worst contributions to religion, it would be its emphasis on an afterlife, for more than one reason.
When the afterlife is emphasized, it almost inevitable that Christianity becomes a religion of requirements and rewards. If there is a blessed afterlife, it seems unfair to most people that everyone gets one, regardless of how they have lived. So there must be something that differentiates those who get to go to heaven from those who don’t – and that something must be something we do, either believing or behaving or some combination of both. And this counters the central Christian claim that salvation is by grace, not by meeting requirements.
