Romans 12

Paul confronts a persistent barrier to true contentment: other people.

Love one another: good. But burning coals on heads?

Forgoing congregational singing as a spiritual discipline

On the way to the soup kitchen, I met a man with a loaf of bread.

Faced with someone trying to deny me shelter from the rain, I thought, are you kidding?

We seem to always want something—anything—to happen. This has implications for the life of prayer.

For this Sunday's Living by the Word column, I focused on the theme of hospitality in the reading from Romans.

For my own sermon on this text, I almost went with the title "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

While this is not the exuberant rhetorical surplus we find in 1 Corinthians 13, love is still Paul's guiding principle.

The church is still uncomfortable with human bodies. It does little to promote the rich connection between bodies and Christian spirituality.

Paul uses "body" as a metaphor, and contemporary Christians do the same when we say "the body of Christ." This metaphorical usage generally takes precedence in the church’s practice.

Bodies matter for Paul. And they matter for Christian discipleship. Paul foregrounds the human body as critical for the Christian response to God's mercy.

Decades ago when I was a graduate student at Union Seminary in New York City, Robert McAfee Brown was the hot young teacher of theology.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about how disturbed and saddened we’ve been by the hateful and decidedly unchristian words spoken by self-proclaimed Christian leaders in recent years. The examples are too numerous to cite, and each has its own agenda of hatred and division. I complained that it was so deeply unfair that such intolerant and offensive perspectives were being allowed to speak for me and all other Christians.

My friend offered a profound and simple response: “Chris, they only speak for you if you don’t speak for yourself.”

What is good and acceptable and perfect?

In the New Testament, God's "violence" is a precondition of human nonviolence.