If you read the Bible closely, you will find many hundreds of people whose names get lost in the credits, who appear to be no more than props in the story, and yet there would ne no story without them. That is almost all of us.

The Church never really lost the Bible’s ambivalence about temples. It has always been more focused on people – what they need to get through the day, what they need to get through this life, what they need relief from.

God is good, but God is not safe. Holiness is not a power to be trifled with because holiness does not belong to us. Holiness belongs only to God. If we are holy, it is only because we reflect the holiness of God, and if we treat the holiness of God with anything less than utmost love and respect, we will find that holiness bears more voltage than we can possibly bear.

Almost everyone recognizes the existence of objective moral values and duties – some things are always right, and other things are always wrong, no matter what any individual or society thinks. How do we explain their objectivity? If it is not based on God, then it can only be based on decisions made by individuals or societies, but that would mean they are no longer objective. So if there are objective moral values and duties, that is a very strong argument that God exists.

When denominations are divided over questions like, “What is a man?”, “What is a woman?”, “What is marriage?”, it is hard to see what kind of communion is possible. What kind of common worship can we have when we cannot say with certainty what sort of human the other one is?

Most people think Christianity  is a set of rules that hold a community together, a program for self-help, or a strategy for achieving a political agenda. It can be all those things, but none of them are the objective of the life in God.

The arc of the Bible is always toward the radical, unlimited love and mercy of God. To conclude, after reading just 1 Samuel 15, that God is a hateful ethnic cleanser, is a stupid way to read the Bible. There is a difference between what is in the Bible, and what the Bible teaches. You have to read the whole thing.

If “True” means only “true for you,” or “true for me,” then it doesn’t mean anything to say that something is true. Anything can be true, which winds up being the same as saying that nothing is true.

St Anthony emerged in 305 AD to organize and lead the small communities of Christian hermits that had sprung up around his place of seclusion. It was these monks who saved the Church at a time when it seemed likely that the Church would be assimilated and secularized as simply the chaplain to the Roman state.

In the Holy Spirit we have intimacy so deep and complete that we have access to the very mind and heart of God. In some people that intimacy is expressed in the ability to speak the language of deepest intimacy, which is what the Bible calls “speaking in tongues.”

The social dimension of reconciliation is sitting in front of a priest who has been empowered by Jesus to hear our confessions, and to receive from him Jesus’ own mercy, not just for the sins we confess, but for all the sins of our lives, including the ones we can no longer remember.