Spirituality takes many forms – silence, breath prayer, visualization, and healing touch. Authentic spirituality embraces the body as well as spirit and mind. When you experience healing touch, your spirit is also transformed. Our cells and souls experience healing when God’s energy flows in and through us. In addition to my daily practices of centering…
“Boundaries help define what a household, family, church, or community holds precious. However, the modern world is deeply ambivalent about boundaries and community. Although we yearn for home and a place to belong, often we find ourselves more comfortable with empty space where we can ‘sing our own songs’ and pursue our own plans. Hospitality…
There is a saying which I’ve seen variously attributed to African, Amerind and Asian wise men, which goes “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true”. A little while ago, I blogged on the back of a short story by Ursula le Guin called “The Ones Who Walk…
A brief discussion of ANTONY FLEW, JOHN HICK AND FREEDOM1 John Hick summarized the traditional freewill defense as an argument with three phases. First, God’s omnipotence is defined as excluding the capacity to perform what is logically absurd. Secondly, to claim that man is free to assert that he can choose between right and wrong….
Recently, as our congregation’s sexton was changing the sermon title on the congregation’s marquee, a woman drove up and asked him, “Are you the new age church?” He responded, “We’re part of the United Church of Christ and our pastor is a biblical preacher.” She continued, “But, how can you be Christian? You’re celebrating earth…
History is a subject we all take in school. Sometimes it’s taught well. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, the study of history is often viewed as irrelevant to daily life. History is about the past, and while we’re told at times that if we fail to learn the lessons of the past, we’re fated to…
Allan Bevere posted a link to three posts by Roger Olson, in which Roger successively defined Fundamentalist, Evangelical, and Liberal. Now Energion author, United Church of Christ pastor, and theologian, Dr. Bruce G. Epperly, responds to Roger Olson’s definition of Liberal. A growing number of liberal Christians are rethinking what it means to be liberal. Many…
The term self deception is sometimes used in a very loose way. It is easy to put ‘self’ in front of ‘deception’ when the self has been passive in accepting a falsehood. When someone believes something false, and we consider that false belief unreasonable we may say, but say wrongly, that the person is self…
If the history of Christianity teaches us anything, with all the divisions, doctrinal disputes, conflicts and even a few wars, it is that a correct understanding of God’s Word is not easily achieved. Of course, one could just take the position, as some Christians do, that it really is easy for them to read and…
In a recent post here, Dr. David Alan Black wrote, “The humility of Christ doesn’t grant us permission on this Fourth to call out our fellow Christians for feeling patriotic or to harp about a revolution in 1776 that was probably at odds with Paul’s teaching about submission to civil authority in Romans 13.” In…
