If even the most authoritative teaching, the most sacred text, leads to dehumanization, to humiliation, to harm, then we must reject it. The Bible itself shows us how to do this. . . . [The rabbis] worked to align the text with their moral understanding. And in doing so, they gave us permission—no, an obligation, to do the same. . . . Our role in r

The goal of this book, then, is to offer clues for getting out of some of the most difficult spots in the evangelical maze, in order to come out on the other side—not just alive and intact, but still interested in a relationship with Jesus.

When LGBTQ evangelicals, their families, and allies start pressing for dignity and even full inclusion, they begin their arguments from within an evangelical theological framework. Eventually they tend to discover that evangelical ways of reading Scripture and, more broadly, of observing reality and discerning truth, may themselves be the problem.

If you’ve been staying home most Sundays because church seems more and more like “a consumer culture” and an “outpost of a political party,” you may discover in chapter 6 that your departure doesn’t mean that you’ve actually rejected church, but rather that you’ve wisely turned away from “a negation of what Christ intended the church to be.”

The populist nature of American evangelicalism—which is an unusually democratic faith tradition—combined with the influence of low-church traditions like the Baptists and so many baptistic nondenominational church start-ups means that millions of evangelicals are set loose on the Bible believing that they need no help to interpret it.

The Bible does not make comprehensive claims about itself like infallibility or inerrancy.

Jesus himself needs to be re-presented and reconsidered, and I will do that here. A term I will offer to describe the vision of Jesus I am embracing is Christian humanism. It is a new term for me to use in my work, though not a new term in Christian history. It basically means orienting our lives by a version of Christian faith that is compassionat

The turn back to Tradition often seems to be a way of resisting the turn to the margins demanded by liberation theologians and other voices focusing on current oppression, especially oppression by the church.

Augustine’s denigration of women is no less objectionable than John MacArthur’s, no matter how venerable Augustine’s writings might be.