Every senseless, horrific act of violence brings up the question of good vs. evil, and when you read that children have died by violence there's even more reason to shudder and doubt.

Forgive me, Mother Ocean, for I have sinned. It has been, well, forever since my last ocean confession.

If we believe what the Bible says about God's concern for the poor; if we believe what the Bible says about justice; then we must denounce the gross inequality of opportunity and income in our country today as blatantly sinful.

During this Lenten season as I reflect on all of the pious and self-righteous fingers of accusation that were pointing at Jesus, I realize how frequently I point my finger at the faults of other people even though Jesus points not at them or at me but to the dust of our common humanity.

Might Lent be reimagined as a season of joy? Yes, but only if we rethink "sin" and "repentance."

By Daniel Burke Religion News Service (RNS) The seven deadly sins have new partners in crime. Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and...

The fact that we see the sinfulness of others ought to remind us again of our own sinful nature, our own potential for such actions and evoke from us a little humility and compassion for all.

Perhaps my pondering on repentance during September led me to think of the sins that I've committed during the past year. I started wondering, could the Seven Deadly Sins could be reframed into something more positive?

Grace is God as heart surgeon, cracking open your chest, removing your heart -- poisoned as it is with pride and pain -- and replacing it with his own. Rather than tell you to change, he creates the change.

There is a prayer of confession of sin that asks for forgiveness for "those things that we have done that we ought not to have done and for those things that we have not done that we ought to have done." There are glaring examples of both in the news.

Someone will object that all this talk about sin ignores the obvious fact that someone like James Holmes is plagued by delusions. No doubt, but so are we all. The stone throwing has already begun.

We need to care about hurting each other, we need to be active in making things right. Because, to paraphrase Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount: You are worth much more to God than chewing gum.

Problems in popular penal substitution theology might be a reflection of the "juvenilization" of American evangelical Christianity. When church becomes youth group for adults, explanations that speak on a teenage level become the norm for everybody.

I believe you have been promoting bigotry and helping to perpetrate a fraud. During both of your interviews with Pastor Joel Osteen, you let the religious leader tell your audience that Scripture calls homosexuality a sin. But you didn't ask him where the Bible says that.

Sin is not about breaking rules. Rather, it is resistance to the creative power of God. Those who thought that they were on the side of God are revealed to be profoundly wrong. We might even call them hypocrites.

As a husband, he failed. As a father, he failed. Yet these seem to be issues best left to be resolved between Edwards and God, not a court of law. There is every reason to believe the case against Edwards is overreach.

For some people, every day is already a painful reminder that they are made of dust. For these people, sin is not so much about pride, but rather the failure to have a healthy sense of self-esteem and love for oneself.

We best resist evil not by ordering drone missile strikes. The best weapon against evil is good.

I began to starve myself to death, and with an experience of sickness that infiltrated into every fiber of my physical, mental and spiritual being. 'What is sin' and 'what does it mean to be a sinner' became intensely personal questions for me.

Fresh from the jarring experience of Yom Kippur prayer, I find myself wishing that we would struggle with sin more than we do.

Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God, dying for the sins of the world, instead of just destroying sin, or perhaps offering grace and forgiveness to the very ones created by God?

The Jewish concept of repentance is called Teshuvah ("return" in English) and one of the critical aspects of repentance is the act of confession.