There are times when the truth won’t let us go. Sure, I can avoid other people’s scrutiny by telling my bullshit side of the story over and over to anyone who will listen. But I know the truth. And so...
The thing about grace, real grace, is that it stings. It stings because if it’s real it means we don’t deserve it. No
The holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things right in front of us.
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....
My own experiences of personal rejection and my years of theological education, countless prayers, an ordination, and a life centered on serving the church, I still have the same personality I was bor...
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...
Looked at you, gave you bread, and said, Child of God, the body of Christ, broken for you. Child of God. Child of God. We’re all children of God. And we’ve been given the authority, even the duty...
It has been my experience that what makes us the saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.
Hoping perhaps that their virtues — their ability to have faith in God in the face of an oppressive empire or a failing crop or the blight of cancer — might become our own virtue, our own strength.
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.
All the misguided harmful messages of my religious upbringing, I still cherish that I was raised in a family where things mattered. Our lives bore a continual inflection of faith. I belonged to a comm...
Without higher-quality material to work with, God resorts to working through us for others and upon us through others. Those are some weirdly restorative, disconcerting shenanigans to be caught up in:...
We met the next day for coffee and when I asked her what was up she said, I think I'm having a crisis of faith. To which I thought, Yeah, she continued, I-I think I believe in Jesus.
To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion. Both pursuits expo...
This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disa...
The week that the gospel text was that awesomely weird story of Jesus casting a legion of demons out of a naked dude and into a herd of pigs, pigs who then threw themselves over a cliff and drowned in...
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...
Sometimes I wonder if that is what faith is: risking an openness to something bigger than ourselves — something from which we are made and yet without which we are not complete, our origin and our com...
Religion can be a way to hide, numb, or even entertain ourselves like a spiritual Candy Crush, either through the comforting blandness and predictability of mainline Protestantism or through the tempo...