For most of my life, everything I knew about Lent had been learned in the Catholic school cafeteria: give something up for forty days and make sure to tell your friends. The best way to conquer Lent was to choose something that didn’t really matter that much to you so it wasn’t a real chore […]
Confessions of a Former Youth Minister
At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty. When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, […]
Putting the Christ in Christian: Do You Feel Uncomfortable Enough?
This post comes to us from Bror Erickson: Christians live in tension and paradox, reflecting the many different maxims of Christ. We are to be in the world but not of the world. We are to lose our lives for Christ so that our lives will be saved. Perhaps the apostle that most exemplified this […]
Stubborn Burros: Why Intrafaith Dialogue May Be More Important Than Interfaith Dialogue
“[A]s far as I’m concerned, he can go to hell.” — President Jimmy Carter on Jerry Falwell, Sept. 1986 Dialogue across social and political lines often seems to get a bad rap these days. I wish I had counted how many of my social media peers had gleefully announced over the past two to three […]
A Feast of Biscuits and Apple Butter: Church in the Time of Covid
This post comes to us from Andrew Johnson: It’s Sunday morning. I’m spreading apple butter on a homemade biscuit. An organ sounds, so I’m grabbing my coffee mug and hustling to the living room for church. Live on television: the organ pipes in the loft of Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral. The angle of the […]
The House That Who Built?
I don’t agree with everything Fr. Stephen Freeman publishes on his blog, Glory to God for All Things, neither can I vouch for all the assertions he makes in his vast library of writings. After all, he operates in a ministerial context on the verge of the polar opposite side (doctrinally) from where I minister. […]
Heaven Is a 12-Step Meeting
It was a big weekend for baptisms and confirmations at our parish. By Sunday evening, I had reaffirmed the Baptismal Covenant from the Book of Common Prayer five times. At the end of the Covenant, the congregation is asked to uphold orthodox practices and beliefs of the Christian faith. The response to the handful of questions […]
Can Zoom Be Sacred? The Architecture of God
We are in an unholy mess. Each day reveals more disease, more anger, more flaws in our culture than anyone could have anticipated a year ago. This season’s inscrutable fears are uniquely human. In the past, we would come together, comfort and strengthen each other, in communities, in families, in churches. But part of our […]
On Cities Unseen: Living in the Homelessness of Grace
We are Settled until We are Unsettled, Home and Yet Not. It’s a Weird Way to Live.
Don’t Overthink It: The Gospel We All Need
People Need a Gospel that Restores Them, not a Demand that Gives Them Stuff to Do, but More Sweetly
