Not Beating Ourselves Up For Lent This Year
Let me say up front that I don’t think we should beat ourselves up for Lent any year, but this year feels especially important to make sure we enter this season with a clear sense of purpose. I’ve been in charge of organizing the Ash Wednesday services for a couple…
Epiphany Blessings
Today (January 6) is the feast day of Epiphany when it is tradition to remember the visit of the magi to the baby Jesus. Even if our nativity sets typically include the three kings huddled around Jesus in the manger, the scriptures tell us this visit happened a bit later. …
Optimism and Hope
I recently finished the book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age by Bruce Rogers-Vaughn. It is aimed specifically at pastors and others in caring professions, but I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the ways that neoliberal capitalism negatively affects our social, interpersonal, and psychological health…
Midweek Blog: Too Deep for Words
Yesterday Joel sent out a collection of Election Day prayers, and I’ve seen many other such offerings floating around. Each one, in its own way, contained words that were beautiful, challenging, comforting, prophetic, and pastoral, and I am grateful for them. And yet, as I write this on Wednesday while…
Midweek Blog: Doing Our Own Work
“Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.” “Men who win on patriarchal terms end up losing in terms of their substantive quality of life. They choose patriarchal manhood over loving connection, first foregoing self-love and then the love they could…
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. + …
