When we want to know about a person's friends and associates, we look at the people with whom she eats, and when we want to measure someone's social status against our own, we look at the sort of dinner parties to which he gets invited...Just as a bad ingredient may contaminate a meal, we often fear bad company may contaminate our reputation or our comfort.

This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.

But sometimes I think what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird. There’s no sense in sending her through the makeover montage of the chick flick when she’ll always be the strange, awkward girl who only gets invited to prom on a dare. In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love. There’s nothing normal about that.

Oh, if I had a penny for every time I've been informed by a evangelical male that I have trouble with submission, I could plate the moon in copper.

Wilhelm Dilthey puts it rather starkly, "Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, but what appeared was the church.

Seems to me that for you, evangelicalism is like the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago, but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.

I played my role as the good Christian girl and spared everyone the drama of an argument. But that decision to remain silent split me in two. It convinced me that I could never really be myself in church. That I had to check my heart and mind at the door.

Turns out, I wasn't the only one struggling with doubt. I wasn't the only one questioning my church's position on homosexuality and gender roles, and a whole host of other issues. I wasn't the only one who felt lonely on Sunday mornings.

In the years preceding the Civil War in America, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery.