Brian McLaren I will not quit. Not today. In case after case, when Christianity has faced a fork in the road, the vast majority took the broad highway of compliance. They went along with their leaders, most without…
Brian McLaren They chose to stay Christian when Christianity as a whole was a hot, violent, ugly mess. During the centuries that followed, the peaceful examples Hildegard, Francis, Clare, and other courageous, creative reformers seemed to be forgotten as the Spanish Inquisition arose and employed the horrific technologies…
Brian McLaren The shrinking of the Christian religion And so, I suspect that the shrinking of the Christian religion will likely become a global phenomenon too, eventually, as long as these trends continue: more young people learn basic…
Brian McLaren Bought by powerful corporate leaders Most Christians today remain unaware of how Christian leaders since the 1930s have been intentionally co-opted (or, more bluntly, bought) by powerful corporate leaders in America (and elsewhere) to provide…
Brian McLaren The choice for many Christians is easy: it’s better for the good guys to win while breaking the rules than for the bad guys to win according to the rules It’s not just contorted history and science that predominate: it’s also twisted, constricted politics. Since democracy is never found in the Bible and since it is only applied in very…
Brian McLaren “Question one moral absolute and you’ll soon be questioning everything.” For Sam, it started in the young adult Bible study group at his church. All the other group members believed that because a certain political candidate wanted to criminalize abortion,…
Brian McLaren Once they practiced denial, deception, and cover-up Of course, now that I’m a bit older and have had my own skirmishes with self-sabotage, I’ve come to wonder if my colleagues and I had it all wrong. It…
Brian McLaren All these observations piled up like a stack of firewood Before becoming a pastor, I thought more time in Bible study, more time in prayer, more time exposed to hymns and worship songs, more time in Christian fellowship meant my…
Brian McLaren, Uncategorized Faithful Creation Care Check out this Q&A from the 2021 Wild Goose Festival:
Brian McLaren What makes religious doubt so challenging What makes religious doubt so challenging is that in almost every religious community, the box of normative beliefs contains beliefs of each kind - personal, historical, aesthetic, scientific, moral, and…
Brian McLaren Voting is a covenant. We’ll use our pulpits to demand it be supported. By Auburn Senior Fellows https://religionnews.com/2021/10/20/voting-is-a-covenant-well-use-our-pulpits-to-demand-it-be-supported/
Brian McLaren When the meaning and belonging modules are out of alignment Now when it comes to intellectual doubt, you’re dealing primarily with your meaning module, the part of your brain committee that thinks critically and analytically. But your meaning module’s independent…
Brian McLaren For them, the conceptual side of faith simply isn’t that important Some people don’t think much about their faith. For them, it’s primarily a matter of belonging (I enjoy being part of a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or dharma group) or…
Brian McLaren Your three-member committee Your singular human brain functions like a three-member committee. Each of your three primary modules includes many distinct submodules that in turn contain even smaller submodules, and the interactions among…
Brian McLaren When a paradigm fails For many of us, faith is our map of reality, our map of the universe. It tells us where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going, where to turn.…
Brian McLaren By the second half of life, they’ll be long gone Back in 2011, Richard Rohr wrote a book called Falling Upward. Richard, a warmhearted Franciscan brother, Catholic priest, insightful teacher, and bestselling author, is founder of the Center for Action…
Brian McLaren Spirit Today’s guest quote is by Brian D. McLaren, from Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: “Pentecostalism in its first dynamic century has helped us see (among…
Brian McLaren Secular Today’s guest quote is by Brian D. McLaren, from Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: “What we call the secular is actually the realm or domain…
Brian McLaren Dismantling the White Nationalist Jesus by Caleb Lines and Brian McLaren https://www.redletterchristians.org/dismantling-the-white-nationalist-jesus/
Brian McLaren Questioning Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliations, fatwas and excommunications. But paradigms and dogma remain profoundly vulnerable with anomalies…
Brian McLaren Good Fruit Today’s guest quote is by Brian McLaren, from A New Kind of Christianity: We pray that God will create something new and beautiful in and among us for the good of…
