Exploring genuine faith beyond the bounds of orthodoxy

  • Diverse, popular early Christian ideas, (most) subsequently labeled as heresies
    If we accept that there is no definitive authority as to which ideas are entirely right/true or wrong/false, in part because the divine mystery is not fully knowable and indeed shrouded in mystery and outright apparent paradox; and that most of the ideas were shared as good faith efforts to make sense of scripture that ...
  • Defining ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’
    If I say I believe that spirit is present in everything we do, that will mean different things to different people. I do believe that, but the resulting imprecision and expectation that we each fill in the details for ourselves renders the term about as useful as, anymore, ‘sustainability’. In this territory, there are few ...
  • Evaluating belief
    We don’t get taught what to believe in school. What beliefs we have in us are formed, initially and largely, by other people, each coming from their own human place. We take on their beliefs as our own. We don’t have very good tools to evaluate what we believe or what we ought to believe. And ...
  • A Pseudo-Faith Suited for Our Age
    Reader, I offer a pseudo-religion for our time. Its tenets are pretty simple. It’s called a pseudo-religion because you don’t have to actually believe it’s true in order to profess it. You can follow it if you are a dedicated atheist, or alongside a religion which you truly believe. As a follower, you just do your ...
  • Little-known facts about the early Jesus movement
    Did you know… … that Jesus was one of thousands of Jews hanged on crosses by the Romans? (hanged by the Romans, not the Jews) … that James, son of Mary, blood brother of Jesus, led the original followers of Jesus, the Jerusalem church, for thirty years after Jesus’s death? … that nobody in the Jerusalem church believed ...
  • What does it mean to act with climate integrity?
    Climate integrity… … is behaving with net-zero ASAP as your highest value … is something that no one can fully succeed at, so therefore we must be reticent about criticizing others or ourselves for our failures … involves changes to behavior – lifestyle, attitudes, consumption choices, diet, mobility, social and political attitudes – … but… … is foremost the ...
  • What should be the purpose of a religious institution?
    We believe in God. But we do not see God as a being actively intervening in our world. We believe that God is, among other things, the Creator force that set the world in motion, and that God calls us, the Creation, towards love. In looking for God in our lives, we believe that the ...
  • The Timeless Harmony of Nature (Quotation from Clement)
    It is dispiriting to hear of fires raging in California, the Great Barrier Reef dying, hurricanes growing in scale and ferocity, coastal flooding, whales moving north, aquifers drying, seasons shifting. In our age of climate change, species loss and competition for scarce resources, we have to up our game and take on the fact that ...
  • Made in the image of God
    What is God’s will for me? How do I take the reins of self-direction on my path? An image appears to me of the unique imprint on me “in the image of God.” Picture a globe, glowing white, with a surface of immense patterned complexity, like a circuit board, or the surface of a brain, or ...
  • A 21st century-viable investigation of ancient sources
    Though mainline Christianity is the founding religious philosophy of the United States of America, it is withering on the vine. Americans have been casting about, with Evangelical faith being the dominant direction. But the 21st century will not be kind to orthodox faith of any kind. We need new voices who can create a human ...
  • Chrysterie is Christ – mystery – reverie ….
    We needed a name that centered on the Jesus path. And we needed a name that acknowledges that mainstream Christians would challenge whether we are Christian at all, and at the same time that simply calling ourselves Christian leads non-Christians to ascribe to us a bundle of beliefs to which we do not subscribe. The earliest ...