Piety. It’s not a word you often hear theologians throw around — and certainly not liberal Presbyterian ones. And yet, I was recently reading Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator by Douglas Ottati, and the thing that struck me was how often he used the word piety and just how comfortable he was with it. It’s not something you expect these days.
The word has become synonymous hypocrite and sanctimonious — and if we were to look the word up, we might find a picture of Tartuffe or a politician who thunders family values but spends the night with someone else’s spouse. Most of us would likely use it in a sentence more or less like this: “Look at him! He is so pious!” or “Don’t be so pious.”
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