12/31/25 – As we close this challenging year, we have a few resolutions for all of us.
*Examine your conscience.
*Exercise faith, hope, and love.
*Practice the Golden Rule.
When Jesus, a Jew, approached the Samaritan woman at the well, he saw both her sinfulness and her humanity. He asked her for water and offered her living water. He spoke to a woman outside of his caste not as if she were an outcast but as a child of God. The poetry and the power of the exchange have continued to resonate 2,000 years later.
When George Washington and our other Founding Fathers established this great country, they did not privilege any religion. We are not a Christian nation by law. The Judeo-Christian values that underpin our laws are generally universal values, which are shared across many different religions. From our founding, our nation has been open to all religions and spiritual traditions.
Our Jewish sisters and brothers remind us of the letter George Washington sent to them (the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island on August 18, 1790), in which he writes, “[our country] gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” using one of the congregants, Moses Seixas’s own words to affirm their God-given right to religious liberty. For example, if Hindus want to erect a statue to a Hindu God on their religious land, the proper Christian and American response is to respect their rights to religious freedom and expression.
In this new year, 2026, we hope people spend less time examining other people’s words and actions and more time examining their own thoughts, words, and deeds, including what they have not done. Are you acting as Jesus would act? Are you exercising faith, hope and love? Are you practicing the Golden Rule? It is not hard on paper. It is often hard in practice. We are not called to an easy life. We are called to a life worthy of children of God. Do your own work, and the world will follow. May we live up to the promise of this country. May God bless it, and may God bless you and keep you in the New Year.
12/26/25 – One of the fruits of a spiritual life is a better ability to examine one’s own conscience, to find one’s own hypocrisies. Isabel Wilkerson would do well to write a sequel where she examines the hypocrisies of blacks. A very light skinned (essentially white skin) black woman once asked me if she looked white. I told her no, I could tell by her features and her hair that she wasn’t white. She looked crestfallen. I then realized that her identity was tied up in her “white skin” and passing as white. How many black men date or marry white women for “status”? How many East Asians think they are better than darker skinned people because they have “white” skin even though nobody would ever mistake them for a white person because, well, they too don’t look white, and how many Arabs or Latinos flatter themselves by also identifying themselves as white even though they are not? (Note: People do look at your features and your hair.) How many Indians are obsessed with “fair” skin? How many poor white people think of themselves as better than others even if they are uneducated or of a lower class because they have white skin? How many of us no matter our race, religion, education, class, etc. think of ourselves as better than fill in the blank? We have all done this, for one reason or another. The ego is robust. God didn’t take any flesh. He did so as a specific person, a Jew, probably with some shade of brown skin, poor but with royal lineage. It was intentional incarnation to send a message to all of us. In Jesus’s own ministry, he started breaking down his caste system. It is up to all of us to continue that work. We can’t do it if we think this is a problem associated with some groups of people and not others. Every single one of us is guilty of it. Every single one of us can also redeem ourselves and change the way we view ourselves, others and the way we interact with them.
12/25/25 – Today is Bada Din (the big day in Hindi), which the entire country celebrates as one of their national religious holidays! Merry Christmas to all! As Christians believe, on this day, Christmas Day, our Lord and our God, Jesus Christ, was born. He was born and died a Jew, and we would like to honor our Jewish sisters and brothers, without whom we would not have our Savior or our religion. We would also like to thank our Hindu sisters and brothers, who have historically extended grace, a reflection of their collective character and the practice of the best aspects of their religion, Hinduism, to people of differing faiths, including Christians.
One could argue that Jesus Christ shattered the ultimate caste system, the Jews and the Gentiles, not with violence but with love. We are now all children of God, equally worthy in his eyes of his love and of his salvation. There is no place in the human family for a hierarchy of human value. Some humans are not inherently more worthy than others of dignity or rights, or of God’s love and redemption, and the humble birth of the Son of God in a manger, to poor parents fleeing persecution, testifies to the proper ordering of all human life – equality in God’s eyes, the creator of the universe and of all life.
Whatever our disagreements on the theology, the best approach is what Indians have historically been practicing for millennia – respectful, shared celebration. In certain parts of India, Christians are called Nasrani, reflecting the name, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph traveled to register for the Roman census, Joseph’s ancestral land in what was at the time the Roman province of Judea. However, Jesus is also rooted in the Jewish land of Nazareth, his childhood home within the region of Galilee. This name, along with other names for Jesus, such as Emmanuel (the anglicized version of the Hebrew name meaning God with us), fulfills a prophecy and reflects the complexity of his identity. Jesus is both of the line of King David and from a poor Jewish town without any worldly status. This dual earthly identity mirrors that of his dual nature, fully human and fully divine. Where are our roots, ancestral and adopted? Are they really as black and white as some would like to believe? Perhaps, like Jesus, they reflect the complexity of the human experience.
God the Father, the “I am” of no name, gave us a Son with many names of prophetic significance, each tied to the Hebrew Bible and to the Jewish people from whom he came, but who is now known as the Savior of the world. Christians believe that the anointed one, the Christ, the anglicized form of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah, was born on Christmas Day, but for all people of all faith traditions, the religious significance is that in a world often full of darkness, one that we create ourselves, there is light and love. There is redemption and salvation. May the light of the world bring you all peace and love today and every day. Merry Christmas, our Savior is born.
12/21/25 – We would like to extend our deepest condolences to our Jewish sisters and brothers. You are not alone. God is with us, and we are with you.
12/21/25 – A few days from Christmas, let us consider names and light. God is “I am.” He has no name, and he needs no name because he is God. Jesus is the light of the world. John 1:5 says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The darkness will never overcome it.
There is a sad squatter in the people’s house who feels the need to put his worthless name on public property as he rages against the dying of the light. His name will come down as cheaply as it went up. His name will be an embarrassment to his progeny after he dies, and he will die. He will rage against the dying of the light, but the darkness will overcome him. The darkness has already overcome him.
These are the things to know. These are the things that matter. A person confident in themselves knows their name as a child of God and knows the light as their savior shines his favor upon them. Is Christianity a dangerous religion? It is dangerous as God is dangerous. Christians worship a man, the Son of God, who was crucified on a cross. No person will ever be more dangerous than Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, because he conquered death with his death and he conquered darkness with his light. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is the light of the world. Go to him. Be saved. Be a child of God. Be the light.
12/14/25 – As we get closer to Christmas, we suggest going to a concert at a church. The spaces are beautiful, and the acoustics are often quite good. As we head into the new year, you might consider how you’re spending your time. You don’t have to be a rich person for refined habits. In fact, you might be better off not being rich. Reading can be free. Just get a library card. For uplifting, beautiful music, see your churches. They are also free, and when they do charge a fee, it’s usually nominal. You could also do other activities that involve being around other people and culture, such as going to a play or to your local movie theater to watch a quality film. How do you spend your free time? Gaming, social media, phone and tech addictions might be “relaxing,” but they coarsen the spirit. They are designed to be addictive. In reality, you do not get anything positive from these habits. They certainly will not help you become a more refined and cultured person.
12/7/25 – Lectio 365 (an app) has been doing lectio divina on John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Fellow Christians, fellow human beings, are your words just a means to enrich and flatter yourself, or do they help you be closer to God? Fellow Americans, if our words have no value, we would be just like every other failed state in human history.
12/7/25 – This pagan administration wants to reward the baby rapists and kidnappers, the Russians, instead of helping the Ukrainian people get justice and defend their country.
12/7/25 – In returning to this question about who we are as Americans, do we, like the blood-sport revelers in the Colosseum, cheer when persecuted human beings, in that case, Christians, are devoured by lions? Perhaps, like the Russian military, we cheer when men rape babies? Maybe we cheer when the men and women who risked their lives to help us are cast aside, perhaps to die, once we deem them inconvenient or undesirable? Maybe we cheer when immigrants, deprived of their due process rights, are tortured and raped in foreign prisons? Do our word, our honor, our founding documents really have any value? Do we mean what we say, or are they just words? Do we just go to church on Sunday, call ourselves Christians, and then allow our soul to be corrupted by a ruthless, greedy, barbaric pagan world? The kleptocrats, here and abroad, are pagans, no matter how they identify themselves. The question is: Are the rest of us who call ourselves Christians also just pagans?
Trump’s Boat Strikes Corrode America’s Soul
The Laws of War Are Not Woke
Condemning Millions for One Man’s Crime
What the Deported Venezuelans Went Through in El Salvador