The Cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness. For that, Easter is required.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.

No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.