The Lord's Prayer Book

Where is Our Joy?

Henry David Thoreau, tucked away in his Walden cabin, wrote that quiet desperation had become the status quo for his fellow Americans. That was in 1845. Today, anxiety and depression are regular rites of passage from which millions never graduate. It’s a sad indictment of a country where so many pride themselves in their Christian heritage. We have the highest levels of church attendance in the world. Almost eighty percent of us say that we believe in the gospel... 

Our Father Who Art In Heaven

The Lord’s Prayer begins with an idea that seems easy enough to understand. Jesus wants to establish God as our heavenly Father, and we as his children. What we often fail to notice though is what Jesus doesn’t say—yet what he leaves out is just as important. What Jesus doesn’t say is that we should pray to God as “My Father.” We are taught to address him as “Our Father” because prayer is not about individualism. It is not a private wish factory... 

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Jesus establishes God as a heavenly father figure, but that’s not enough for most of us. Without a name, he seems lost in abstraction. Try as we might, we simply can’t bring him into view. There is only the vague presence of someone hovering around us—like the adult of a Charlie Brown Peanuts Special, always outside the frame, speaking in a strange indecipherable language. Jesus understands our predicament, but unlike Moses, who chiseled the Word to fit... 

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Laughter & Prayer

The Three Laughing Monks

In China, there is the legend of the three laughing monks. They are also today sometimes referred to as the three laughing saints (but of course in a very SBNR way). The monks only ever did one thing: on entering a new village, they would stand in the market place and start laughing. They would laugh with their whole being (mind, body, heart, and soul) and suddenly people would wake up to the Life and Kingdom of God that surrounded them. A crowd would soon gather... 

Prayer & The Oracle of Jesus

In this final installment of our special series on the Founding Fathers and their thoughts on God, Religion, & the Divine, we move to farmer, politician, and guerilla revolutionary leader Ethan Allen, who perhaps is best known for leading the Green Mountain Boys (and other fighters) in their raid and capture Fort Ticonderoga, a strategic victory which severely hampered communication between the northern and southern units of the British army. Like Thomas... 

SBNR: Daily Motivationals

The Laughter of Christ

The Dalai Lama of Tibet is said to have an extraordinary laugh, one that rises frequently and joyfully from deep within his body. This is something we don’t attribute to Jesus much: laughter. We get so caught up with Jesus’s end game and the “man of sorrows” image that we lose sight of how much fun he must have been to be around. After all, Jesus certainly wouldn’t... 

Tom Robbins on Religion, God, & The Spiritual Life

Tom Robbins is the kind of author who people often say you either love or hate. All things considered, that is probably the best kind of author to be, as it reflects that level of truth telling which always inspires radically opposing emotions in others. Robbins is also the kind of author that we at The Living Hour would identify as an excellent example of the SBNR Progressive Christian, even... 

Jesus the Satirist

In our SBNR Motivational The Laughter of Christ, we talked about how Jesus must have had a great sense of humor. Finding examples of the Nazarene’s humor isn’t easy though when reading the Gospels. Some folks have pointed towards Jesus’s admonition that we shouldn’t worry about the speck in our brother’s eye when we have a beam in our own as one example. But that is a bit of a stretch.... 

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SBNR & Progressive Christianity

The God Collision: Christopher Hitchens is Not an Atheist

Ever since professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens published God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything he has become the patron saint of 21st century atheism. But is Hitchens really an atheist? Here at LivingHour.org we’ve always suspected no; that Hitchen’s... 

Praising Contradictions

There is one thing that many scientists and orthodox Christians share: that is, a dislike of contradictions. That an electron can appear as either a particle or a wave is as disturbing to the scientist, as the mystical phrase You are God and not God is to the evangelical Baptist.... 

Jesus’s Audacity of Acceptance (Not Hope)

The latest e-Bulletin from the Center for Progressive Christianity is titled “Why Do We Dare to Have Hope?”—a somewhat tepid title variation of Barack Obama’s well-known book The Audacity of Hope. In the newsletter we thus have articles dealing with the role of HOPE... 

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