Don’t know how to tell if God is talking to you? It’s a common problem. When I was a kid, folks at church taught me that God speaks to each one of us. I learned about Moses talking with the Burning Bush, and Paul’s blinding encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. These stories were inspiring, but …
Humanity is on a collision course with basic physical reality. For hundreds of years, we’ve operated as if the natural world were merely a source of raw materials for our ambitions and prosperity. But God’s creation is neither infinite nor meant to be casually exploited by human beings. Our way of life is unsustainable, and …
There’s a stick of dynamite sitting on your bookshelf. There’s a flamethrower in your desk drawer. Beneath the statues and federal holidays, there lies buried the raw power of men like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, women like Rosa Parks and Ida B. Wells. The lives of the prophets are still with us, entombed …
TL;DR: Post-Evangelicals are one of the most important religious groups that are shaping America today. In many ways, I wish I was one, because I’d like to take part in the conversation. In this piece, I explain my experience as a child of some very early post-Evangelicals who got pushed out of the Evangelical Quaker …
I had a friend contact me recently, asking me some tough questions. He wanted to know why I am preaching a message of radically following Jesus, while at the same time authoring an ebook about traditional Quaker worship. Isn’t this a contradiction? Why am I promoting a particular denominational heritage when my core message is …
Does Christian language make you uncomfortable? It probably should. In the early days, the Christian community used starkly imperial metaphors to talk about Jesus. They called him messiah, king, savior of the world, and a host of other names that were almost smirking in their irony. These were titles for the Emperor, not a man …
For early Quakers, heaven wasn’t a far-off kingdom floating in the clouds. It wasn’t a distant time and place, standing in stark contrast to present-day, historical reality. When Quakers said that Christ is here to teach us himself, this was just a new way of saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven has come near to …