As I wrote in I, like any good middle-class mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's...
And to say Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are...
And then I remember: it doesn’t matter. The fact that I sometimes don’t get it is my shit, and I should not confuse my shit with my job. My job is to just love my parishioners. And I do. Not perfectly...
We should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should...
Mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. W...
Which is exactly why our demons try to keep us from people who remind us how loved we are. Our demons want nothing to do with the love of God in Christ Jesus because it threatens to obliterate them,...
When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on th...
Unitarians just don't talk much about our need for God's grave. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the...
This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than inclusion. Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all...
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...
New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve...
Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my coll...
And every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I disco...
What they don’t tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends.
Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union , and purity is about separation .
I keep making mistakes, even the same ones over and over. I repeatedly attempt (and fail) to keep God and my fellow humans at arm’s length. I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say...