Last week I heard Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the writer and scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, interviewed on the radio. He told a story that I haven’t forgotten. Rabbi Kushner was invited to a dinner for a class of young people preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah. Classes completed, they had come […]
Belief
You Don’t Have to Be Good
The things people tell a minister after church. . . . Yesterday a woman I did not know spoke to me after church—she was there for a baptism. I heard about the church of her childhood, where “salvation” was attained by refraining from smoking and drinking and dancing and cursing. It was a rigid theology […]
Atheists Doubt Too
Sometimes we imagine—those of us who try each day to believe—that it must be nice to be an atheist and be so sure. It must be easy, we think with some rue and a little envy, not to have to prove anything because you swear there’s nothing real beyond what you can prove. C.S. Lewis, […]
The Parable of the Raft
One of the Buddha’s most famous teachings is the Parable of the Raft. In it he likened his teachings to a raft for crossing a fast-flowing river. A man is trapped on one side of a river. On this side of the river, there is great danger and uncertainty; on the far side is safety. […]
The Mask that Changed His Face
In an age of doubt and—worse—of apathy and cynicism, we all struggle to “believe.” We can’t believe what we blindly accepted as a child; many passages from the Bible are either confounding or troubling; taken literally, the Creed is a bridge too far. Faith or spirituality was always presented as a matter of “belief”—what you […]
The God Who is Already Here
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is. -Albert Einstein My colleague, Jonathan Thomas, preached a provocative sermon yesterday. He challenged our basic assumptions about God—where God is and isn’t; what God gets involved in; the occasions, moments, places where […]
This I Believe–In 8 Words
My church, the Episcopal Church, just concluded its national convention. Critics of liberal religion were quick to condemn the gathering for accommodating the timeless truth of the gospel to the whims of today’s culture. Ross Douthat of the New York Times had a suggestion for us. “The leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies […]