And with an openness that felt like spiritual waterboarding (Jesus holding my head under the waters of my own baptism until I cry uncle), I had a long conversation with my enemy.
Pas • triks) noun 1). A term of insult used by unimaginative sections of the church to define female pastors. 2). Female ecclesiastical superhero: Trinity from The Matrix in a clerical collar. What on...
There is a king in that text, but it’s Herod: a scheming, frightened, insecure troglodyte who puts a hit out on a toddler.
The thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.
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 only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with God and each other when we are uncool, lame, blind, poor, and crippled. And as uncomfortable as I am, as you are, to be seen in such...
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...
Makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin.
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.
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...
We weren’t a ship of fools so much as a rowboat of idiots.
Truth. It can make me hate the person speaking it. Until the point at which I want to kiss them for setting me free.
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...
There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics...
Standing in a large Minnesotan church hall I tried to muster up the interest and stamina it takes to greet each person with the honor he or she deserves. This always feels like a battle between my mis...
Sometimes God needs some stuff done, even though I can be a real asshole. There is absolutely no justice in the fact that Larry loved me and that church. But if I got what I deserved in this life, I'...
So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the...
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...
I’m not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down.
It is next to impossible in isolation to manufacture the beautiful, radical grace that flows from the heart of God to God’s broken and blessed humanity. As