Religion
-
The Great Storyteller
•
5 min read
A few years ago, in the summer, I would scoop up my precocious three year-old and we would brave the Georgian heat to go for a walk. “Long walk or short walk,” I would ask. “Long walk,” she replied. As if there were any other kind to her. We would take off down the road.…
-
Talking GOD: the Tony Jones Challenge
•
3 min read
[Tony Jones recently challenged progressive theo-bloggers to talk about GOD. You can find the rules here and check out the follow-up post. The exercise has so far been fruitful for me, as I’ve written a couple of posts that will go up in the next few days about two aspects of GOD: GOD as the…
-
Grumble if you must, but then trust
•
7 min read
a Homily for Proper 14B Text: John 6:35, 41-51 In our gospel story, Jesus turns his attention from the crowd to the Jewish leadership. He has been talking about bread—the bread from heaven. He makes reference to the story told in Exodus. It goes a little like this. The Hebrew people, living in Egypt for…
-
Learning How To Sing
•
4 min read
I remember a specific moment of great happiness from my childhood. It was the day I learned I no longer had to sing at school. I didn’t dread singing until fourth grade. The year I had my first crush, my first acknowledgement that boys and girls really were different, the first realization that what I did…
-
Why do you follow?
•
5 min read
a Homily for Proper 13B Text: John 6:24-35 Why do you follow Jesus? For Christians, this should be an easy enough question. But it isn’t for most of us. Or at least there’s trouble in the answering. Why do you follow Jesus? For many of us, we had a moment in which our belief in…
-
Experiential Teaching Is Not For the Weak
•
2 min read
There is something about this story about a “fake kidnapping” that seems strangely wrong. Not in the idea of terrorizing youth or in the idea that we are an “overly judicious” society. There is something else. Toward the end, we get the defense: “It was a youth event, to illustrate what others have encountered on…