Author: Ralph Rickenbach

Is God ready to die for us? Christians would ask what a question that is supposed to be, as the answer is an emphatic yes, proven by historical facts. Did Jesus not do precisely that? I propose a different narrative. Let us, for a moment, look at Jesus’ death as a prophetic enactment of a…

I have a divided relationship with Christmas. It is remembering the beginning of the season that opened up the ways of thinking and seeing the tree of life again. God is becoming one of us so we can realize that we are one of his kind. The trinity never was a trinity but a multitude.…

Today, I will talk about one of the foundational stories of all three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. God tells Abram to offer up his son as a human sacrifice one day. He does so with much obedience and trust, maybe even prophetic insight. God, at the last minute, keeps him from killing Isaac…

For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, … Hebrews 10:1 See to it that you make everything according to the pattern you were shown on the mountain. Hebrews 8:5, Exodus 25:40 Do you remember the allegory of the cave by Plato? In it,…

Faith: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the church. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. It is one of the biggest misunderstandings that we always think we must rediscover our faith. We believe…

I am playing off the title of A. O. Hirschman’s book “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,” but I have to admit that I have not yet read the book. I am telling you my thoughts and associations when I heard the title. There are three ways to react…