Incarnation is good news not because it offers us a way out of the mess of this world, but because it shows us what God’s love looks like here and now.

If you think it is more important to be moral than loving, you probably don’t understand what either word really means.

The weaponization of belonging is one of the most “anti-christ” dynamics I have ever encountered.

When you assume the goodness in one group is an exception but believe the goodness in your group is the norm, you’re probably being prejudiced.

If your orthodoxy doesn’t fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.

Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us – and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.

It’s important to take life very seriously. That is why we must laugh at every opportunity.

The level of ‘acceptable’ dishonesty we Christians allow to avoid facing uncomfortable truths betrays our ideals as shallowly held.

The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us – poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction – where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

One of the deadliest tools of powerful systems is narrow definitions of what is “normal” and the reduction of difference to deviance.