I grew up in small city in Pennsylvania and most of my friends went to church. I had only one classmate, as far as I can remember, that was Jewish. But while I learned from him some things about Hanukah – probably because it seemed “close” to Christmas – I never learned about Yom Kippur; in fact, I’m not sure I knew it existed. In college I had a lot more Jewish friends, so I knew that Yom Kippur was important to them, and I knew it meant “Day of Atonement,” but that’s about it. So if you’re anything like me, you might be helped by even these few paragraphs from a brief article on Yom Kippur from the Huffington Post: The...

I’m a huge fan of the Christian concept of vocation: that God calls each and all of us to serve God by serving our neighbor in whatever roles we may have. So whether you’re working or volunteering or a parent or sibling or student or friend or citizen – whatever role you have you can serve God by serving others. I’m attracted to this idea because it elevates our daily work and effort. In the middle ages, Christian lives within a spiritual hierarchy. Yes, it was good to be a mother or father or bricklayer or whatever. But it was better to be a priest and even better to be a monk, and so forth. One of the things Martin Luther protested...

If you’re at all familiar with Peter Rollins’ work, you know that he is one of the church’s more provocative writers and thinkers. Author of How (Not) to Speak of God and Insurrection: To Believe Is Human To Doubt, Divine, Pete is particularly gifted at shocking us into looking at our lives and the gospel – and especially our lives in light of the gospel! – in a new way. In this video from the great folks at Work of the People, Pete says the church reminds him a little too much of a crack house. That is, people take drugs to escape their pain – they’ve ended a relationship, didn’t get the job...

Believe it or not, this is a more complicated question than one might imagine. On the one hand, those who argue against the proposition point to several key pieces of evidence. First, many if not most of the Founders of the country cannot be described accurately as Christians but as Deists, persons who believe that a benevolent Creator set the world in motion but no longer intervenes in it. Indeed, Washington would never publicly admit to being a Christian and Jefferson was regularly accused of being hostile to Christianity and famously took his scissors to the Bible to cut out any incidences of divine interaction. Further, the United States...

What do you think of when you think of faith? Some folks think of the things you have to believe. To have faith is to believe certain propositions regardless of external evidence. Others see faith more as a matter of trust. Faith is, quite literally, trusting in something or, even more, trusting in someone. For most of my life I’ve leaned toward this latter view, that faith is relational. In the Apostles’ Creed, for instance, we don’t just confess the faith by saying “I believe that there is a God” but rather the more relational “I believe in God” – that is, I not only believe there is a God, but put my trust and confidence...