Midweek Blog: Useless Beauty
“A work of art offers a paradoxical liberation: it is something that changes everything while being perfectly useless in any ordinary sense…Art’s role in the contemporary world may well be precisely to be un-useful, to reveal the importance of uselessness in our lives. You can’t eat a painting. You can’t…
Just-Peace Camp, Season 1 Recap
Here’s what you missed on JPC… Not being together in the building means that if you don’t have children participating in Just-Peace Camp, you might not even realize it is happening. Rather than doing multiple days in a row, we decided to spread the program out over three weeks, releasing…
Midweek Blog: What’s Before Us?
Staying at home during the pandemic has given me lots of time to do more reading. A few weeks ago I even stayed up past my normal bed time to finish a book about the Enneagram that I was especially enjoying. I pushed through to the end and went to…
Props, Presence, and Prayer
Like many of you, I have been doing a lot of listening these last few days, wary of adding my own voice in any way that would de-center the voices of Black people or other people of color. I have sat uncomfortably with the anger, sadness, grief, and terror that…
Midweek Blog: Daily Connector Edition
I thought I’d use this month’s mid-week blog to answer the prompts from the Daily Connector series. If you haven’t done so already (or even if you have) you can sign-up to write your own reflection HERE. There are still plenty of open slots for the end of May. + …
Apocalypse Now?
One of the last things my husband and I did before the realities of social distancing set in was to have dinner with his sister and her family. The topic of conversation turned to the coronavirus, and at some point someone said, “It all feels so apocalyptic.” Without missing a…
Practice
Lent is a season for slowing down and focusing on what matters most. For many people this entails “giving up” something. This act of fasting can be a way to practice discipline, to free up space in our lives, or simply to stop doing something that we know is not…
Creation Care Commitments
If you missed our Winter Seminar a few weeks ago, you missed out on some great conversations about practical ideas for how we as individuals and as a congregation can practice care for Creation. Amy Huser, the Sustainability and Outdoor Education Director from Camp Friedenswald, led the seminar on Saturday…
These Holy Days
This year I’ve been trying to stop myself whenever I refer to the Friday after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday.” Sometimes it just comes out, but each time it does, I find that it catches in my throat. When the words tumble out, I pause and consider how the “biggest shopping…
Abstinence Pledge
Our worship series on healthy sexuality wrapped up at the end of October. If you missed any of those services, you can find the sermons posted on our website. While that series was going, the High School Sunday School class was using a companion curriculum to explore the same themes…
