God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.

The titles of Jesus (son of God, messiah, light of the world, etc.) are not found in the earliest layer of tradition and are not part of self proclamation of Jesus. This does not make them wrong. Rather, they are the voice of the community, statements about what people around Jesus thought of him.

Some people find the experience and practice of compassion as a spiritual discipline to be a more direct route to the transformation of the heart than prayer. It is not that prayer does not or should not play a role in their lives, but their way to the opening of the heart lies through deeds of compassion. "Just do it" summarizes this path of transformation.

The Bible is true, and some of it actually happened.

There are people who assume that Christianity is about the afterlife and that our chief problem in this life is that we are sinners who need to be punished and the point of Jesus life is that he took our punishment so we can go to heaven. I write about the problems we get ourselves into by misunderstanding and limiting the way we think about our faith.

The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred.

Christianity's goal is not escape from this world. It loves this world and seeks to change it for the better.