I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.

It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.