****YOU HAVE REACHED THIS WEBSITE IN ERROR
-THIS WEBSITE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE****
PLEASE OPEN A NEW WINDOW
AND GO TO OUR NEW WEBSITE AT

WWW.PROGRESSIVECHRISTIANITY.ORG 
THANK YOU!

If there is one religious principle I would legislate, if there was one commandment I would like to see engraved over the entrance of every public building, it would be:
DO UNTO OTHERS WHAT YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU.

Those who forgave the deadly, racist shooter in the Charleston church were as Christ to me. Their grace exposed the racism of those who held onto the confederate flag as a way of life. Their grace transformed parts of the country that seemed irredeemable.

The Cathedral of Hope, a congregation of the United Church of Christ, is based in Dallas, Texas, and is the world’s largest liberal Christian church with a primary outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Local and national church ministries, outreach programs, pastoral counseling, television media and the internet touch thousands of lives each day.

9 times out of 10 it is not about explicit individual prejudice. It’s fundamentally not about you as an individual, nor is it about feeling guilty for being “racist” as a white person. It’s about principalities and powers, systems so deeply rooted in us that they shape our very way of life. And those dynamics are built to remain invisible to all those are advantaged by them. Now that’s sin! But it’s so hard to express this in ways white people can hear without feeling like they are under attack.

There is a problem in the black church. It is a problem with black bodies and a blues problem. This book addresses these problems head-on. It proclaims that as long as the black church cannot be a home for certain bodies, such as LGBT bodies, then it has forsaken its very black faith identity. The black church must find a way back to itself. Kelly Brown Douglas argues that the way back is through the blues.

We know what to do. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” Unitarian Universalists claim the “inherent worth and dignity of all humanity.” Christians claim the Apostle Paul’s ecstatic revelation that “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female.’ Instead you all have the same status in the service of God’s anointed Jesus.” Leviticus 19:18 says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, “Love your enemies.”

It was a very good week for our nation. I rejoice in it, welcome it and give thanks to God for it. The world and the church have the opportunity today to be more profoundly Christian than we were able to be just last week. That is a powerful and a welcomed realization. John Shelby Spong

It’s a confusing world out there if you’re attempting to discern what a supernatural, divine being is trying to do and say in this world. Between, on the one hand, the millions of Seventh Day Adventists meeting to argue over whether the Bible permits or disallows the ordination of women, and, on the other, the Archbishop of Canterbury trying to placate his riven bishops after a vote to allow priests to perform same-sex marriages was passed at the Episcopal General Convention in Salt Lake City, the deity’s message is mixed, to say the least. On any given day, thousands of rival decisions made by the myriad arms of the Christian church are reported on around the globe. Add all the other religions and their interpretations of what morality and ethics mean in the twenty-first century, and you’ve got a lot of deity decisions, many of them contradictory, being shared.

Shortly after Reza Aslan and Hasan Minhaj’s, “An Open Letter to American Muslims,” was first published on RD this past Tuesday, it became clear that it had launched a critical discussion across the United States.

Religious Liberty

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision broadening the understanding of marriage, those who have fought same-gender marriage now express fears that they will be called upon to do things their consciences will not permit and are clamoring for “religious liberty.”

  “If faith communities lead the way in honoring the reality of same-sex marriage, the law will eventually follow.” — Jim Burklo, BIRDLIKE AND BARNLESS, 2008 Oh happy day, Friday, June 26, 2015! — when our dearly …

Liberty and Freedom: People – especially politicians, it seems – frequently use the two terms interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. But while civil liberties can be legislated and personal freedoms can be infringed upon, there is something autonomous about personal choices and actions that can never ultimately be denied or encumbered. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” the late author and civil rights activist, James Baldwin, once said. “Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”

An earlier commentary considered the two ideas of conscience and consciousness as a spiritual component and practice of human experience. These comments are written as we approach our nation’s annual observance of the Independence Day holiday; exploring what might constitute a progressive Christian perspective of a kind of liberating “freedom” that is comprised of loosing the bonds of all the little deaths we die, and binding oneself to that which can irrepressibly spring once more to life.

In my pocket, all my waking day, I carry a device that enables me to communicate instantly with practically anyone around the globe. I’m a cog in a vast international system of manufacturing, trade, and consumption. Sure, we’re all connected in these ways. But in our face-to-face encounters with other people, or when we walk in wilderness and commune personally with other living beings, we sense this connection in a much deeper way.

So, here’s a question: how do we train kids to have compassion? How do we get kids to understand that the right response is the loving, honest response? I don’t know the answer. But I promise I’m working on it. All I know how to do is to model it. The only way I can think of is we can bring more love into the world by the act of love. We need to act lovingly. We need to BE LOVE for there to be more love in the world.

Rachel Held Evans has been called “the most polarizing woman in Evangelicalism.” She is a New York Times bestselling author of three books and a popular blog in which she wrestles honestly with the cruelties and contradictions in her Christian tradition from the standpoint of a loving insider on a quest to understand God and goodness more deeply. In this interview by Valerie Tarico, Held Evans discusses both the book and her broader faith journey.

A majority of American voters say they support a Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex couples the constitutional right to marry, but the issue remains far from settled among socially conservative religious communities that have repeatedly proclaimed biblical support for human injustice.

My cousin Sally is struggling with her faith. She finds it difficult to attend church services because she can’t find one that will engage her questions or make her feel welcome. Sally was raised in a conservative Baptist tradition, and loves everything she learned about God and the teachings of Jesus, but challenges homophobia and the literal appropriation of the Bible as the only way she can remain a Christian. As a Presbyterian minister, I was able to reach out to my cousin Sally after almost 20 years, to let her know she was not alone in her questioning the relevance of Christianity in contemporary society.