Author: Michael Salsaa

I would like to both acknowledge and dedicate this class to my friend Debora who has been instrumental in bringing this to life.   Last week I received a message from Alice. It was quite obvious from her message that she had experienced a moment of awe. When Moses asked God for His name, God…

Last week the question was: “Do you see this world, this life, as essentially good or as essentially evil?” Perhaps what we were missing from this discussion is that the designation of what is good and what is evil is relative. It is based on the observer. It comes from a human centric vision. When…

It seems that a large portion of what God tried to get us to see is His grace. We tend to be blind to it, because grace is very different from our natural knowledge, which arises from our vision into how humans and the world function around us. We look for cause and effect, we…

What do you see? This is one of the existential questions that God asks of each of us. Vision and light are some of the most occurring themes in the bible, and for an important reason. It seems as if God takes us on a spiritual journey of sight and blindness, light and darkness, insight…

Today, we will start a three-part discussion on light and blindness. It seems as if God takes us on a spiritual journey of sight and blindness, light and darkness, insight and ignorance.  In the very first chapter of the bible the Creation and the manifestation of Light together convey a certain truth about God. Let…

I have been fascinated by the topic of death for years now. Mystics and sages say that the only way to live life fully is to accept our deaths. That’s easy, you may say, I’m fully aware that I’m going to die, I’m just a human after all.  But Ernest Becker begs to differ with…

We previously discussed the parables of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus spoke to the people during his ministry. When we substitute “Grace” for the “kingdom of Heaven (KOH)”, many of these parables take on a fascinating new perspective and even offer a coherent understanding of what Jesus was trying to teach us about. Take…

We started our discussion on the identity of God by pointing out that we rely on images from the Old Testament to learn and understand more about who God is. These images present us with rich metaphors about God. I would like to start today’s class with a quick description of what a metaphor is. …

Note: large segments of this class have been taken from The Suffering of God by Terence Fretheim.  Today we will continue our discussion that we started last time on the character of God in the Old Testament. Last time, we discussed how we often get hung up on the question: Do you believe in God?…