If your identity is found in Christ, then it matters less and less what people think of you.

To imagine things other than they are is the essence of hope. It is also the stuff of revolution.

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For?, 1989 Jesus pioneered a relationship ethic based on compassion. Being a disciple means building relationships - with the Creator and with all creation and creatures.

Two opposing gospels are fighting one another for the soul of our nation and, increasingly, the world: the gospel of consumption and the gospel of peace.

A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."

The teachings of Jesus begin in story and end in symbol - they begin in parable and end in us. These are not Bible stories that we learn; these are our stories.

The church must provide postmoderns with an alternity of rituals by which they can turn and tune to one another and feel connected to the cosmos.