Last night I was reading an excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, The Prime of Life, in which she describes in almost ecstatic tones the wonder of working and living on her own as a writer and philosopher.  She was free to do as she pleased- to come and go and eat and sleep and…

I’ve recently begun a three month experiment in co-leading a small group of self-described cynics, skeptics and religious misfits engaging our questions at the intersection of life and God.  Tonight we’ll be revisiting what it means that Jesus is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). This implicitly exclusivist claim makes me squirm.…

Is it possible to take seriously the unique, “once and for all” saving work and person of Jesus Christ, while also respecting the views of friends from other faith traditions and engaging in genuine interfaith dialogue?  Is it feasible to have a high Christology and a robust soteriology, without treating every interaction with a Jew,…

“And this is the boldness we have in [Christ], that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him.” – 1 John 6:14,15 This week the precocious ladies in Clairmont…

The nineteenth century philosopher and theologian Sören Kierkegaard recognized that every individual must wrestle with the implications of God’s Word for herself.  The “collective,” or, in this case, churches and religious institutions, do violence to this necessarily subjective, deeply personal relationship between an individual and her God when they impose a particular, general and “objective”…

“I am the way and the truth and the life!  Nobody comes to the father except through me.” – John 14:6 It may be hard to believe, but we’re actually doing a series on all the names given to Jesus in Scripture.  Today, we look at a verse that has achieved a level of infamy:…

If you could think of one example in your life of how God was real to you, what would it be? Co-founder and co-pastor of Kairos Church Thomas Daniel begins last week’s sermon with this question.  What follows is an effective distillation of the nature of postmodern evangelism, taking the witness of the blind man…

Fellow saints and sinners have left some interesting comments during the last few days!  Someone with the online name of “Roodness” writes the following in response to my “Coffee with Jesus” lampoon of manliness pastor and cage fighter Mark Driscoll’s remarks on women in leadership (see http://blog.beliefnet.com/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners/2012/01/coffee-with-jesus-jesus-sits-down-with-mark-driscoll.html): “…It really comes down to: do we take the…

We’re back with Stanford neuroscientist Saskia de Vries in a conversation about neuroscience and faith… I’m curious about how you read Scripture these days, and want to spend some time here.  How do you read the creation story, for instance?  In a soundbite, I take Scripture seriously, but not literally. That always sounds a bit…

“I’ve got nothing against God, it’s His fan club I can’t stand!,” goes one bumper sticker.  Endless scandals, bickering, and declining membership and budgets in many denominations all point to a long, historical track record of failures to be the “enchanted community” (to borrow fellow saint and sinner Bob Henderson’s expression) the church claims to…

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