On some level, although we can’t handle the pain of acknowledging it, Good Friday happens every day.
On All Saints’ Sunday, I am faced with sticky ambiguities around saints who were bad and sinners who were good.
Of course if no one had ever been exposed to dangerous ideas from scandalous women, Christianity itself would not have had its unique beginning nor its glorious history, but whatever.
Maybe we want the people who care for us and lead us to not be like us, to not struggle like us, because if we realize they, too, are hurting and needy, then maybe the spell — the illusion that we’re...
It doesn't feel very difficult to draw a direct line between the messages many of us received from the church and the harm we've experienced in our bodies and spirits as a result. So my argument in th...
I told them that when I heard Billy was bright, an artist and musician, and when I heard that he loved his family and loved people through difficulty in relationships, and when I heard that he struggl...
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend t...
As the social philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
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.
And the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was, This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do a...
Again and again Jesus had said they should preach forgiveness of sins in his name. Maybe Judas was destined to betray Jesus. Maybe it couldn’t have gone down in any other way than it did. But maybe Ju...
What if God’s Word is so much more powerful than our ability to become worthy of God? I mean, not for nothing, but if God can create the universe by speaking it into existence, then I think God can...
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 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.
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.
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.