Allowing ourselves to name the harm and be angry about the past is not a bad place to be; it’s just a terrible place to stay.
There was something about hearing it that was so different than just imagining it to be true. To hear I was loved meant something very particular because of the context in which I heard it, as though...
She said, I think I’m having a crisis of faith. To which I thought, What the hell does that look like for a Unitarian? Yeah, she continued. I think I believe in Jesus. Oh. That’s what it looks like....
Maybe we simply don’t want our leaders to have needs. Maybe it’s not only the leaders who think they should be perfect; maybe it’s also their followers who expect them to have it all together. Maybe w...
Demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he encounters them he tells them to piss off.
Being loved, really loved, can sting a little, reminding us of all the times we have loved poorly or not at all, all the ways in which we have done things that make us feel unworthy of real love.
The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness.
The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in...
The adjective so often coupled with mercy is the word tender, but God’s mercy is not tender; this mercy is a blunt instrument. Mercy doesn’t wrap a warm, limp blanket around offenders. God’s mercy is...
The Jesus whom God sent to claim and save us is what keeps me in Christianity, despite a hundred reasons to pack up and leave.
Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for.
Sometimes help comes from unexpected places.
People don’t talk enough about what the freedom of a Christian looks like.
Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself.
Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside, blessing all the accidental saints in this world, especially those who that world — like o...
Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all th...
It’s my practice to welcome new people to the church by making sure they know that House for All Sinners and Saints will, at some point, let them down. That I will say or do something stupid and disap...
Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.
I'm surprisingly unconcerned with what people in my church believe. Belief is going to be influenced by all sorts of things that I have nothing to do with, so I don't feel responsible for that. I'm re...
I often think that the effort we put into trying to pretend something about us is true — that we are less than we are or more than we are or that one aspect of ourselves is the whole story — is based...