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On Spelling It Out
It is normal today to say we live in an abnormal time. We think everything is damn confusing. Or not at all. We speak out of one side of our mouths that this is a time of all this conflicting data, but ideologues speak with such consistency and confidence. We recognize complex problems and we…
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Who do you say that Jesus is?
In Sunday’s gospel story, we had the famous pair of questions Jesus asks: Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? As I was writing about this idea for our parish newsletter, I realized something important. These two questions have two more hidden questions, or more precisely, two hidden…
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Why do comedians defend what’s unfunny?
It’s old news now, but an idea has been nipping at me for some time. There was a surprising dust up involving the comedian Daniel Tosh and a blogger that responded to a joke about rape. There are many details about the two that are almost irrelevant to the story because it became a story…
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Christianity and the Falling Man
From Surreal to Real Hearing that a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center wasn’t the most arresting thing I heard eleven years ago. At work, the rampant speculating, the absurd discontinuity of airplanes and buildings in far away places made the tragedy distant somehow. News spread in the waning minutes…
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The Dream 2012
On the 49th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it seems fitting to reflect on where we are in fulfilling it. Back in January, I wrote this for King’s birthday: It should surprise none of us that a leader villified by the conservative white community as “uppity” would become as…
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Oscar the Grouch and The Pursuit of Happiness
Among the most famous sentences in the English language is found in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. This came to mind…
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Pussy Riot Reveals Russian Morality Police
Or I (heart) Pussy Riot I’ve only just come across this story as I catch up on my podcasts and as Christian Piatt covered a few days ago. Christian covers the discomfort we have in the prophetic action and the challenge of protest in an admirably personal way. You should really check out his post.…