• Fear of God as Wisdom

  Why don’t we preach hellfire anymore? That’s a question asked frequently today by a lot of sincere religious people who worry that too many churches and too many priests and

  https://ronrolheiser.com/fear-of-god-as-wisdom/

• The Real Tragedy of Sin 

  The real tragedy of sin is that often the one who is sinned against eventually becomes a sinner, inflicting on others what was first inflected upon him or her. There’s

  https://ronrolheiser.com/the-real-tragedy-of-sin/

• Reticence and Secrecy as Virtue

  In all healthy people there’s a natural reticence about revealing too much of themselves and a concomitant need to keep certain things secret. Too often we judge this as an

  https://ronrolheiser.com/reticence-and-secrecy-as-virtue/

• Playing Loose With the Truth

  It can be quite disheartening to watch the news these days. Our world is full of hatred, bigotry, racism, and over-stimulated greed and ego. The gap between the rich and

  https://ronrolheiser.com/playing-loose-with-the-truth/

• God’s Closeness

  There’s a growing body of literature today that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for a period of time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and

  https://ronrolheiser.com/gods-closeness/

• A Threat to Our Decency

  Jesus tells us that in the end we will be judged on how we dealt with the poor in our lives, but there are already dangers now, in this life,

  https://ronrolheiser.com/a-threat-to-our-decency/

• Paralysis, Exasperation, and Helplessness as Prayer

  Several years ago I received an email that literally stopped my breath. A man who had been for many years an intellectual and faith mentor to me, a man whom

  https://ronrolheiser.com/paralysis-exasperation-and-helplessness-as-prayer/

• A Plea for the Soul

  It’s hard to find your soulmate in someone who doesn’t believe you have a soul. Recently on The Moth Radio Hour a young woman shared the story of her breakup with her

  https://ronrolheiser.com/a-plea-for-the-soul/

• Kathleen Dowling Singh, RIP

  No community should botch its deaths. That’s a wise statement from Mircea Eliade and apropos in the face of the death two weeks ago of Kathleen Dowling Singh. Kathleen was

  https://ronrolheiser.com/kathleen-dowling-singh-rip/

• Close the Distance not the Gate

  Nobel-prizing winning author, Toni Morrison, assessing the times, asks this question: “Why should we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another? Why should we want

  https://ronrolheiser.com/close-the-distance-not-the-gate/