American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The Passover wasn’t just Israel’s story; it’s ours.
God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.

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Perhaps best known for his “wager,” Pascal is often associated with this curious argument for the existence of God and eternal blessedness.
We might assume that all ways are equal to raising a child in wisdom, but they are not.
In life, we make decisions, from the most basic to the most lasting, lacking specific knowledge about the outcome.
Throughout the centuries, “Inferno” has also played a large role in the development of Christianity, particularly in the Western Medieval church.
There is God. He existed before anything existed, for he has always existed and he will always exist. He created everything that exists outside of himself, and therefore he owns it all, including humankind.
When orthodoxy becomes a Law, heterodoxy can feel like the Gospel.
He is significant, not as a founder of his own movement, but for setting the procrustean bed of the particularly American church with its dogmatizing yet broad ecumenical stances.
When Lamech named his newborn son Noah—which means “rest”—he said, “This one shall give us comfort from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed”
Being a member of a church connects people to the whole reason the church has for existing: that we might obtain justifying faith in Jesus Christ through Word and Sacrament.
Pelagianism is the ancient heresy that says that if you work hard enough and will something strongly enough, you can prevent sin
If I’m going to join your church, there’s some things I’ll need to know first. I need to know whether you practice a Christianity that’s primarily a to-do list.
I was once asked why I thought young people were leaving the church in droves after they graduated high school.