Raised by Jesuits: Reason, Conscience, and Complexity in the Modern World

The Worship God Rejects Why God Isn’t Impressed by Ritual Alone In my first post on Raised by Jesuits , I wrote about the gap between professed faith and lived action: What happens when religion becomes performance, when belief floats unmoored from behavior. I’ve been sitting with that tension again lately, especially in light of a provocative truth found in the Hebrew Bible: God doesn’t reject people because they worship incorrectly. God rejects worship because people are living unjustly. That reversal matters. We often imagine that God demands reverence, obedience, religious observance, and if we get the liturgy right, say the right prayers, sing with the right amount of sincerity, then we’re aligned with the divine. But the prophets of the Hebrew Bible paint a much harsher, more urgent picture. Over and over again, we hear God refusing worship. Not because the music is off-key or the sacrifices impure but because injustice is being ignored. “I hate, I despise your festiva...