To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it. To love as God loves us--in freedom and with no strings attached--is a way to grant others a liberating gift.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

The Christian life does not just evolve. It also requires specific decisions and public commitments to deepen our faith and obedience.

God's love for us is uncoerced and so freely given that it does not demand a response. But so freely is it given that it creates freedom in the recipient, so that our response is not one of obligation or duty, nor the returning of a favor, but uncoerced love.

The Old Testament does, in fact, seem to make a distinction between the life of a child and the life of a fetus.

I've come to believe that God, in His wisdom, allows martyrdom in every generation in part because, without them, the reality of Christ's death for us becomes increasingly blurry... As we look at [the martyrs], the mist that sometimes enshrouds first-century Golgotha is burned away, and we see...the Lord nailed to the cross.