I know that people who don’t believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to...

Repentance in Greek means something much closer to “thinking differently afterward” than it does “changing your cheating ways.” Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like...

As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in...

Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God’s glory and the healing of God’s world. In the...

God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.

Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.

The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while on the one holding it...

Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times...

There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay,” Matthew later told me. “Fight to change it.

Jesus says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” He says, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and infuriating things like “if you seek to find your life...

It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear,...

We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that...

If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people—intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc.—whom I...

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God’s forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why? Growing up, I thought it was...

This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.

When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess, I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided, and that I have now thankfully...

God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and...

What they don’t tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I...

The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in...

Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” not forgive us and smite those bastards who hurt us.

He said that there would be more information available in the narthex. I leaned over to Matthew and whispered, “The Narthex? Isn’t that a Dr. Suess character that speaks for the trees??

I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand...

Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between...

There’s something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics...

From my father I heard only these words: “But you were born for such a day as this.” He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and...

Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son...