Christianity—A Statement of Faith

Christianity does not belong to any one person, political faction, or perspective. Its heart is humility and its ethic is all-encompassing—eternal, and always present, universal, and addressed to each individual—without exception, without fail.

Christianity is grace, love, and justice. It is rigorous, and it is true.

Christianity belongs to all who believe. That belief can contain hard questions, doubts, and anger. It can contain great suffering, hope, and error. It can be reticent, silent, spoken. Belief can be slow to build, it can be broken, it can be weak. It can be something that we carry with us but do not pretend to fully understand. Christianity belongs to all who walk along its paths.

I am a person of this faith, a broken person in a broken world. For me, this means that:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

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I am a mainline Protestant Christian, baptized in 2019 in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, instructed by the sermons of the late Presbyterian Reverend Earl Palmer, grounded in the habit of reading theology and literature together: St. Augustine and Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Aquinas and Flannery O’Connor, John Calvin and Herman Melville, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gloria Naylor, James Cone and James Baldwin, Jonathan Edwards and Marilynne Robinson. Over the years, my thinking about religion has also been shaped by the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kołakowski, Tracy Fessenden, Rachel Held Evans, and many others.

I am not a trained theologian. My academic background is in the study of literature. This is an independent project, written from personal belief and interpretation. If what I write here is of value to you, it will simply be because my honest questions and deepest hopes about this faith and its traditions are also yours.