Although the soaps can verge on stereotypical and sensational with their cliff-hangers and tears, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures also grasp that stories can shock us with miracles, healing, resurrection, and subversive moments.
The New Testament is the inspired Word of God, and in committing it to heart, we are in fact internalizing the God-revealed answers to the mysteries into which every society in all human history has desired to look.
While the march to full marriage equality in the United States seems to advance at an agonizingly slow pace, it is important for us to recognize that most American Catholics support marriage for lesbian and gay couples.
Today I'm not worrying. I'm not fretting. Today I'm joyous -- because the nuns are here. Nuns to the rescue!
Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from above. For all who sang that song from the heart after Sept. 11, the Occupy Movement was part of God's answer to that prayer.
I walked out of the church into a warm and breezy afternoon feeling lighter. The experience reminded me that reconciliation and healing between peoples is possible.
It's been a journey for all of us and we did kind of "grow up in public" as has been said of us before. A few punches in the gut in the course of one's life will have a tendency to do that
David Brooks writes that, "Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is..." The trouble isn't that we lack a moral vocabulary; it's that that language has long been a mask for wielding power.
What is happening at the Vatican is an illustration of the problem of balancing maintenance and attention to substance. But those who are involved at the levels of decision making in Vatican City are not evil people.
I've been tracking these recent calls by pastors for the death of LGBT people on my blog, and a few readers are seemingly excusing these pastors' behavior by stating, among other things, that they were "just quoting Scripture" or "thinking out loud." I disagree.
Right there, up in the pulpit, pretending to care about nothing so much as extending the love of Christ, is every encouragement any bully could ever need to viciously hound, beat to a pulp or push to suicide a desperately forlorn gay person.
Everything we value is possible only because of death. We can no longer afford to remain ignorant of it; the cost is too high. Death is no less sacred than life.
The would-be prophet cowers before the throne and whimpers, "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips." No posturing. No preachiness. No self-righteousness.
Opponents of marriage equality often appeal to the Bible to support their views. So what is this "biblical standard for marriage" we keep hearing about? Marriage in the Bible is not restricted to one man and one woman, or in fact to any one model.
I think Barry W. Lynn's letter could prove to be the snowball that finally starts the avalanche that ultimately wipes out political proselytizing from the pulpit of American churches.
Black women should treat the black church the same way they would treat a patriarchal, self-serving, preachy boyfriend, and let their feet do the talking. If they ever do, patriarchy and homophobia in black churches will fall by the way side.