Wayne Williamson/Empowering Grace

Happily married for 46 years, blessed with 3 amazing children and 9 grandchildren.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

The cross is not a logo for a culture‑war brand; it is the shape of Christian ethics. When believers use Jesus’ name to intimidate, exclude, or punish those who differ, they have traded the cruciform path for the way of Caesar. Cruciform ethics means we absorb misunderstanding, bear reproach, and lay down privilege for the good of the other. If my “convictions” require me to crush you, they are not cross‑shaped, they are just baptized self‑interest.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

When Christians try to force belief, enforce uniformity of conscience, or legislate people into the kingdom, they contradict the King they claim to serve. Jesus warned against uprooting the “tares” ourselves, because in our zeal we destroy wheat as well (Matthew 13:29–30). Coercion is not courage; it is unbelief masquerading as zeal. The kingdom ethic is witness, persuasion, and costly love, not compulsion.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

There was a time when Christians were formed before they were informed. The Church catechized her people slowly, shaping them by Scripture, the creeds, and the long memory of the saints before ever asking them to weigh in on the affairs of the age. Much of what passes for Christian conviction today skipped that formation entirely. It arrived fully assembled from a media feed, and it asks nothing of the soul that received it.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Stillness exposes us. The moment the noise stops, we discover how restless we actually are, how many voices we have been using to avoid the one Voice that matters. This is why so few stay long in silence. The early discomfort is not failure. It is the beginning of healing, and the Fathers urge us to remain.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

It’s a rough time to be a scientist.

You spend decades learning how to measure things properly.

How to separate signal from noise.
How to distinguish hazard from risk.

And then you open your phone and watch fear beat data - again and again and again.

In the lab, we argue about controls, concentrations, confidence intervals.

Online, people argue about screenshots, podcasters and blogs.

This little molecule in my hand?
The dose matters.
Exposure matters.
Evidence matters.

Being a scientist today means doing more than running experiments.

It means explaining, clarifying, correcting - over and over and over again.

So yes - it’s a rough time to be a scientist.

But it’s also the most important time to speak up.

[Lesslie Newbigin @LesslieNewbigin]

A church that sees the cross of Jesus as the central event of history can never identify any political order with the reign of God.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

One of the biggest lies we Christians have come to believe is that the best and most effective way to address the pressing issues of our time is to gain more control over others rather than become more compassionate towards others.

This is the opposite of the gospel of Jesus.

[Rich Villodas @richvillodas]

After shouts of Hosanna, Jesus enters the temple & clears out those who have used religion to exploit people.

He then welcomes the blind & paralyzed in the temple & heals them.

Holy Week reminds us that Jesus has a furious love for those the world has little regard for.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Repeated exposure to emotionally charged content trains perception. The more often anger is activated, the more natural it feels. Familiar emotion begins to masquerade as objective insight.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

If our Christianity causes us to protect the powerful and ignore the powerless, that’s when we know we are following someone other than Jesus.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

We live in an epoch in history when many people have, for various reasons tied to the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age), lost access to their own interior. We can speak of disenchantment, disillusionment, a collapse of the horizons of meaning and significance, and even deconstruction, just to name a few (and "few" is an accurate term). The loss of interiority is due to everything becoming externalized. We have been seduced to trade avatars for real people. We have co-opted authenticity in favor of performative, transactional relationships (which in fact are no relationships at all). When we lose the ability to interact with all the parts inside us that have become fragmented and dis-integrated, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to interrupt cruelty, whenever and wherever it starts. The absence of a genuinely rich inner life is not a small thing at all. It is the precondition for every form of destructiveness to other and self that shockingly wears a clean face.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

When someone has built their entire identity on being right, compassion becomes the most threatening force in the universe. Not because compassion is weak. Because compassion requires you to feel something you have spent your whole life building walls against. The walls are not strength. They are the perimeter of an ungrieved wound.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Live long enough and serve long enough in the care of souls, and you discover that there are persons who need someone else to be their enemy in order to feel alive, and they mistake that for power. The truth is, they are enslaved, and their perceived enemy becomes the only thing that holds their world together. If that enemy is taken away by anything less than the work of God in their hearts, everything they have built collapses like a house of cards. The reason is simple: there was nothing they were building on that was rooted in reality. Everything they built was built on opposition. Opposition is not an identity. It is a symptom.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

The measure of a civilization is not its economic output or its military reach. It is how it speaks about the people it disagrees with. When mockery replaces discourse and dehumanization becomes entertainment, we are not witnessing strength. We are witnessing decay.

[Rich Villodas @richvillodas]

The Church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

There is a moral truth about power. The deepest kind of power is not the ability to destroy. It is the ability to stop living by an old script. There are moments when a person has every cultural permission to retaliate, humiliate, or finish the other. But maturity chooses restraint, not because the other deserves it, but because the self refuses to be shaped by contempt. Restraint is not passivity. It is the refusal to let another person dictate the kind of soul you will have.

[Fleming Rutledge @flemingrut]

Jesus doesn’t wait for clarity. He doesn’t require calm.
He gets into the boat.
And the wind stops.
Not because they believed enough.
Not because they recognized him.
Not because they finally got it right.
The storm ceases because he is with them.

--sermon notes from Ben DeHart

[Sharon Hodde Miller @SHoddeMiller]

Our nation is sick, and the problem is not “the other side.”

The problem is us.

[Jim Corbridge @MrBonMot]

Today I'm hosting an AA meeting.

[Wayne Williamson/Empowering Grace @wayne_gateway]

The ongoing, fruitful advance of God's Kingdom does not come by striving to win CULTURE WARS through engaging the world in its POLARISING SOCIOPOLITICAL GAMES, but through the RADICAL REFUSAL to play their 'US versus THEM' GAMES altogether.
#EmpoweringGrace