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“If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence… and no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.”

When we conceive an all-powerful God, then God is responsible for all that’s wrong with the world—in her word, “a monster.” And I have pastorally and personally witnessed those who suffer or those who suffer loss doubting God’s intentions or God’s existence. An omnipotent God who fails to care must be distrusted or killed.

I believe Christianity is conducive to this way of thinking, as it conceptualizes a God of compassion, willing to be vulnerable to the point of death—all out of love.

Meaning plays an essential role in religion. Clearly understanding this role and applying meaning in sacred dimensions can significantly increase the meaning-yielding power of our Christian faith. It is possible and advisable to place meaning at the center of our faith. Perhaps Meaning-Centered Christianity is an appropriate guidepost for the new Progressive Christianity.

About our Seminary Programs At The Chaplaincy Institute, we believe that the world is in need of the gifts and talents of every individual called to service. Our Interfaith seminary is dedicated to supporting the unique call …

The progressive movement is not entirely a 21st century invention. Through the centuries there have been prophets and poets, philosophers and scientists who have tried to draw back the curtain from myth and superstition to reveal the reality of other worldly religious claims, calling us back to the basics of compassion, love, and justice.

Isaiah (Isaiah 28) says that the preaching of the priests was like baby talk or just drunks vomiting in public. That’s harsh but test that theory against most of the sermons you have heard lately!

What are the big questions that religion answers?

I know what you are thinking, this being St. Andrew’s, and St. Andrew’s being a good liberal Protestant church: “Bob, it’s not about answers but about living the questions.”

We can say that, yet we do need answers. Questions are fine in church, but we live day-to-day by answers, no matter how tentative and incomplete they may have to be. Whether or not there are any definitive ones to be found, we’re all hunting for answers.

One traditional formulation of the questions that various religions seek to answer is: Where did we come from? What happens to us when we die? How are we to live?

As in any art form, as we release judgment, silence our mind, breathe deep into the process, and find bliss in each step; we realize that we are boundlessly assisted in our authentic and heart-centered expression. We step out of the way. We realize that the Art is not born of us, but through us, and in this understanding we are humbled, yet profoundly empowered. Each creation is an offering: a positive reflection of ourselves and humanity, a celebration of evolving consciousness, an opportunity for healing and deepening, a vision of a bright future and Now.

I can hear my friends now: “Matthew! You’re beginning an article with a Calvin quote?!” Why, yes, yes I am. And here’s why: because, regardless of the many things I disagree with Calvin over, it’s a great quote. Indeed, without knowing ourselves we can’t expect to know God and without knowing God we can’t truly know ourselves. The sad thing is, so many of us don’t act as if this is true. We talk about God in terms of his loftiness, like a king on his almighty white throne. God is omni-everything. And perhaps God is, but that is not my point here. My point is that we then turn around and, in spite of humans being made in God’s image, talk about ourselves as things like “filthy rags,” for instance. We treat others as such too. We do things like insist, with cold faces, how those we don’t like are going to burn in hell for their iniquities. Then we send them there through war and conquest and terror. Assuredly then, I’m afraid we have missed the mark when it comes to knowing God and Self. The proof is in the pudding, unless of course God is a maniacal tyrant just like we human beings tend to be.

At the root of the current political, economic, cultural, and ecological chaos is a national spiritual unrest, a fragmentation that has inhibited society’s self-awareness and slowed theological progress to a glacial crawl.

In a nation where three-fourths of the population identifies as Christian and religion salts the political discourse, unrest has manifested itself as the talking-head debate between atheists and believers. In All My Bones Shake, Robert Jensen reveals the multitiered complexity of the conflict and offers a progressive approach to its key theological questions. While fundamentalists on both sides have fought to an intellectual standstill and moderates seem content to ignore the battle, Jensen pushes for answers that make sense for anyone trying to exist in the modern scientific world, concluding, “There is no God, and more than ever we all need to serve the One True Gods.”

  If God exists, does he care about his evolving, suffering world? Most answers are unsatisfactory. Morris’s book is different: short but not superficial, strong in its science and philosophy, and realistic as a carer of a …

Imagine a world where people allowed others to live freely as the people nature intended them to be..without harm..without persecution..without shame. Imagine a world where we are truly free.

  View Video of Fred’s Sermon at IUCC on June 12th, 2016 My story starts 35 years ago when I entered seminary. Pacific School of Religion is the oldest seminary on the west coast and has always …

World leaders are waiting anxiously before the British referendum on EU membership on 23 June 2016, while Remain and Leave campaigners bombard voters with facts, opinions, and threats, causing confusion about what is true and what is false, and who could be believed. Many like me are ‘Don’t knows’, between a rock and a hard place, with uncertainties on both sides.

Life is like that. It poses big questions and asks us to vote. To weigh the evidence, choose between not only competing facts but competing interpretations of facts, opinions, and risks, and reach a balanced judgement of what we think is right.

“I believe we have been called to show compassion and to fight injustice. And regardless of whether or not you believe in God, your acceptance of that call is what validates your identity as a Christian.”

Watch below sermon by High School Student at All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA on June 6th, 2016.

Join Jason Silva as he freestyles complex systems of society, technology and human existence and discusses the truth and beauty of science in a form of existential jazz.

One of the world’s foremost historical Jesus scholars helps the church and its alumni/ae rise above the greatest of Christian treasons: that everlasting peace can only be achieved through the onslaught of divine violence.

Religion is a controversial topic, and I’d like to preface this article by saying that it is not my aim to belittle or diminish anyone’s beliefs. My problem is not with faith but with religion as an organization, which has been used as a means of control, to pit people against each other, and to incite terror and war. Religion in this context serves the purposes of many various global elitist agendas.

Religion is also confusing, to say the least; within several different religions exist different ‘sects,’ each with their own teachings and version of the ‘truth’ and how to live one’s life. Within Christianity alone, there are multiple versions of the Bible, and teachings that contradict one another. What one religion says in one part of the world may directly oppose what another says in a different part of the world. This alone is a recipe for feelings of confusion and isolation for anybody who is seeking ‘the truth.’ If various religions preach different ways of life and truths, they all can’t be correct, can they? I guess that’s why they call it faith.

These days of “do-it-yourself” improvement techniques have spawned an industry of providing sometimes simplistic solutions to life’s problems. So my title is a little tongue-in-cheek. I don’t present what follows as “dramatic truth,” or “divine revelation,” let alone “the secret”!

At the same time, I remember a friend reared as a United Methodist telling me he had never been given a spiritual path until he was introduced to The Twelve Steps. Another United Methodist—a college professor or mine—shocked everyone by candidly answering “no!” to an ordination question, “Are you on the road to perfection?”