I firmly believe that God wants us to leave sin behind, but not because he is some malicious legalist holding every human to an impossible moral standard or because he flies off the handle in anger anytime we do something wrong. God hates sin because sin hurts us. And God hates to see us get hurt.
— Zach W. Lambert, Better Ways to Read the Bible, p. 92
Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 18, 2026
First, the church needs to stand as a counter-witness to all dehumanizing and nauseating propaganda. Jesus spoke powerfully and directly to this calling as his central message in the Sermon on the Mount: we are taught to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. The vocation of every Christian and of the church as a whole is to stand always against the dehumanization of any person or group. Even when we rightly understand a group or person to be a legitimate threat or to be engaging in active harm, we are tasked with never losing sight of their humanity, their possession of the imago Dei, and the unconditional and undying love that God has for them. Beyond that, the church has been taught to embrace an “upside down” view of the social order wherein those that our community deems least worthy of honor and dignity – the oppressed, poor, and marginalized – are understood to be the very people whom we are most honored to count as members of our body.
— Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard, Eucontamination, p. 192-193
Photo: Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 18, 2026.
Peter’s “strange sight” challenges him to face his prejudices. And not just his, but the prejudices of the entire church. Little has changed since Acts 10. We still consider people unclean and unworthy of association. Peter’s “strange sight” calls the church, then and now, to the hard work of facing and dismantling what Paul calls the “wall of hostility” that exists between peoples. If we want to “discern the spirits,” to sort out if a prompting or calling is coming from God, let’s pay attention to Peter. When your enchantment causes you to embrace people you have treated as unclean, that looks a whole lot like the work of the Holy Spirit.
— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 222-223
Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 19, 2026
There are a lot of things I cannot be certain of, but I am certain that God is not fragile. Nor is God in the business of creating subjugated people with no liberty to question or to wonder. Arguing not only with God but also with God’s sacred text is a path toward our liberation, a way of pushing back against the forces of injustice that plague us.
Humans are thinking and feeling creatures, passionate at times, and the Spirit of God invites all of that – all the critical thinking, all the deep engagement, all the reasoning together – into the relationship we have together. This intimacy, this authenticity, goes to the very heart of what it is to know and be known by Spirit.
If you can bare your angst, your frustrations, your disagreements, and your dread to someone, yet they are unshaken, what sort of healing and liberation might be found with this person? How much more so should this be true with the divine? To argue with God is to belong to God; it is to embrace a love that surpasses all understanding – and be transformed by it.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62
Photo: Giverny, France, June 16, 2026
But this story of ultimate reconciliation is not just a stack of Bible verses. It is a key theme of the whole Bible, and it is essential to how we relate to God. We connect to God and love God because God first loves us. God is not a punisher; God is a healer. We fail, but God’s steadfast love “endures forever” – Psalms 136 repeats this truth twenty-six times! The redundant message doesn’t make for the most subtle poetry, but some truths need to be drilled into thick skulls. Despite the way that Christian history shows how we are experts at missing the point, those who know God best have always known that at the very heart of God is unfailing love.
— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 104-105
Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026
The aim of this book has been to help you discover the grace of lament. When dark clouds roll in, lament is the path to find mercy – even as the clouds linger. Lament is the bridge between dark clouds and deep mercy.
— Mark Vroegop, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, p. 190
Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 17, 2026
I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.
I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.
— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 61
Photo: Dipladenia flowers, June 13, 2026
In story after story, Jesus reveals all the ways we’ve misunderstood and misrepresented God. This is the good news: God loves us and is here to rescue us, not to condemn us. Cast away the old visions of bearded Zeus, of paternalistic punishers, of Bible verses as weapons, of faraway fear coming home to roost, of switches and beatings described as love. Such things aren’t love. They never were.
The love of God isn’t a far-off destination we are striving to arrive at. Nor is it a prize that will be given to us only if we earn it. It’s not for the winners or the ones with answered prayers. It’s not just for the ones clutching their pearls over you. It’s not just for one denomination or church or religion. Now, we are all loved now.
— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 62.
Photo: Zweibrücken Rose Garden, Germany, June 18, 2024.
[About the Tower of Babel:]
But God intervenes, not to punish them, but to disrupt their project of homogenization. God creates diversity where there was uniformity, scattering them with new languages, new cultures, and a plethora of voices. They wanted control, but God imposed chaos – a kind of holy chaos that prevents the concentration of power.
Walter Brueggemann speaks to this, noting that a human unity, when built outside God’s will, often ends in “oppressive conformity.” The people of Babel weren’t just unified; they were uniform. And in that uniformity was a desire to control what was different and unpredictable. But the Spirit of God is a Spirit of disruption, making space for the multitude of stories that refuse to stay silent.
— Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, p. 145
Photo: Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 7, 2026
Centuries of philosophy have tried to solve the problem of evil, yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the problem of good. How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.
— Richard Rohr, Yes . . . And: Daily Meditations, p. 288
Photo: Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 7, 2026