Christena Cleveland

When it comes to “saving the world,” I am much more interested in the life and teachings of Jesus than I am in any divinely ordered sacrificial actions that humanity has overly burdened the stories with. Even in the stories themselves, we see signs of the importance of his life and teachings.

Biblically, there’s no indication that prophets necessarily have supernatural powers. Occasionally, prophets hear the voice of God and communicate it to their people, but more often, prophets are simply those who perceive the actions of their communities and deduce the likely consequences.

Donald Trump is returning to office. The part of me that majored in Political Science wants to remind us of how political pendulums tend to swing back and forth over the years, and even so, general progress has been taking place for humanity. This part wants to join St. Julian of Norwich in saying that in the big picture, “all shall be well.”

In order to push back, in both religion and in politics, we have to get over our addiction to the “easy fix.” It’s not only a lie, but in the case of November 5th’s election, it’s straightforward escapism — evading the real issues at hand in order to avoid any personal responsibility.

We are living in a post-truth, post-trust, post-rational world divided by fear and deception.  How did we get here?  By incremental acceptance of the unacceptable until it seems normal. 

In honor of Gustavo Guttieriez’s recent death, I found myself thumbing through some of his works in my home library and my eyes especially fell on his Conclusion to his fine study On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent.

In Hebrew scriptures and repeated in New Testament teachings, G-d assumes all authority in the practice of vengeance. If, after thousands of years, we truly trusted this to G-d, how might we face this moment we have co-constructed? The wars, the biodiversity loss, the assault weapons, the changed climate.

When I heard the news of Harris running for President, I immediately thought about how my deceased Brooklyn  Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm would be proud of this moment. Chisholm was the first African American woman to campaign for the presidential nomination in 1972 on the Democratic ticket. 

It is much worse to wreck the law’s foundation, which is perfectly legal to do, than it is to break the law, which can land you in jail. Unless Americans understand this, and vote accordingly, we’ll lose our democracy on November 5.

American Christians often wonder exactly how their faith and politics ought to intersect.  It’s an understandable confusion, especially for those who value freedom of belief and religious diversity.  I often hear that we should “keep politics out of the pulpit,” but doing so is a theological impossibility for those who take Jesus’ teachings seriously because Christianity is inherently political. 

Our ego approaches life as if there were too little time to overcome the breach of space that separates us from one another. The fuel propelling our drive is the thoughts littered like kindling across the landscape of our mind as we have struggled to construct a seamless forever bridge from our heart to another’s.

White, Christian, and nationalism are three words not to be taken lightly, three kairotic words that demand explanation and understanding. So here is our question: why does a movement describe itself as white, Christian, and nationalist?

At the heart of Project 2025 is an aggressive and ambitious policy agenda for a vast expansion of presidential power.  In spite of Donald Trump’s endless denials that he knows anything about the project, the leaders of the project are virtually all close associates of the former president. 

In my years as a pastor, I frequently lamented the religious and denominational silos that inhibited collaboration among faith communities and leaders in a neighborhood, city, or region. It seemed that intra-religious and intra-denominational demands were so great that multi-religious and trans-denominational collaborations were relegated to the margins.

First of all, the New Testament doesn’t directly deal with the issue of abortion or even when life begins. And, the Old Testament or the Jewish Bible turns out to not be anti-abortion at all.

We all know the damage the Religious Right has done to the reputation of Christianity around the world, and now it is our time to reclaim the moral power of our Christian tradition, using our faith to inspire and motivate the millions of people of faith across the country who are longing for a message of hope, a vision for a better tomorrow, and a way to connect that vision to the faith that forms the foundations of their lives.

The Gospel, known as John, is a paradox for progressive Christians. On the one hand, it seems to offer much egalitarian goodness and spiritual depth and insight. On the other hand, it is the gospel that’s been weaponized the most by conservative evangelicals and wielded to serve as a gate for who is in and who is out of the Christian faith – and salvation.

Happiness is an elusive… Trickster. We catch wisps of it in our peripheral vision. We taste sips of it in moments of presence and authentic joy. It’s the carrot dangling that keeps us moving forward when we feel empty or like giving up.

Some conservatives think they’ve got a winning strategy in disparaging Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire.” Because she’s a woman and racial minority, she can’t possibly be qualified — just like all those other non-white, non-straight, non-male people who’ve unfairly been “given” straight, white, male jobs.

By now almost everyone has heard the news that Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Education Ryan Walters is requiring that the Bible be taught in every public school from grades 5-12. 

The Republican Party, since the 1870s, has been nicknamed the GOP—the “Grand Old Party.”  This was to emphasize its role in preserving the Union during the Civil War.  I wonder if, in light of its current cult-like status, it ought to re-brand itself.  Maybe GOP should stand for the “Grotesque Old Party.”

In the life of the soul there is no substitute for direct knowledge. The spiritual journey unfolds in and through our direct personal experiences that is fueled by the soul’s longing. As human beings our longing both to know and to be known is infinite. A challenge for us is the discovery that even if we know ourselves or another directly, the longing remains.

And as you adore the people adoring the blessed sacrament around you, you ponder how very many different circumstances brought them here and how many very different experiences they may be having right now. 

The laws we have are products of a particular group, not universal truths. The question then becomes: who gets to say what? White land-owning founding fathers? Hateful white nationalist? The majority? A greasy wheel minority? In a sense, every rule or law arises out of a specific context, a given historical situation.

In June, United Methodist Church delegates voted to repeal its church’s long-held exclusionary stance of its LGBTQ+ Methodists- in church doctrine, polity, and social standing.  The news was received with mixed feelings – cheers and tears. 

Whenever churches focus too much time and energy on church membership, attendance, budget, and endowment, over time, they lose their way.  Churches would be better off focusing on the realization of the church’s mission statement, which has to do with their sense of identity and purpose as communities of faith.

After growing up in a Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian tradition, I have come to identify as a Progressive Christian. I’ve noticed that the term has a lot of different meanings to different people, which makes sense given that relatively few of us started as Progressive Christians. For many of us, Progressive Christianity is like the place we we came to as we escaped from somewhere else. The word “camp” is fitting:. I don’t think of Progressive Christianity as a destination, but rather an ongoing process.

There is not much in this world that I would call a miracle, but the world itself definitely is. It’s existence and ability to support and sustain the life that it has is simply improbable. How dare humanity so go about to indifferently as we are destroying a miracle.

For our entire existence, humans have lived with two realities: the religion of empire and the religion of creation.  The religion of empire is a kingdom, ruled through the lens of Individualism and fueled by the fear of scarcity.  The religion of creation is a kin-dom, ruled through the lens of relatedness and fueled by the generosity that is love. 

Christianity doesn’t exist. Christianity has never existed. These might seem like radical statements, but they are objectively true. For the past 2,000 years, there has never been a singular, united, global religion called “Christianity,” but rather millions of variations of a spirituality rooted in the person of Jesus that most scholars now refer to as “Christianities.”

For decades, the United Methodist Church has been a notable outlier. With 7 million members in the U.S., the UMC is the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination and is by all accounts quite liberal and progressive on most matters – except for the matters concerning homosexuality.

he schism the United Methodist Church has been enduring the last few years, culminating in this Spring’s General Conference in North Carolina, is also a direct result of unresolved Civil War era prejudices.

When pastors retire after a lifetime of service to the church, they often preach a last sermon unfettered by concerns for continued employment.  It is the sermon “they always wanted to preach” but were afraid to, lest some big contributor take her money and leave the building.  Clergy are, by and large, not a particularly courageous lot.

Today, I want to talk about one of my modern-day heroes, Alok V. Menon, known as ALOK. ALOK (they/them) is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor. I’ll add prophet. ALOK speaks brave truth to power and firmly holds themself in compassion and love.

That great defender of the faith, Don Trump, responding in faux outrage to the fact that Trans Visibility Day happened to coincide with Easter this year, declared that Election Day 2024 should be “Christian Visibility Day.” As if Christians have a visibility problem in America today.

It has been my privilege to absorb the teachings of Aquinas in my training as a Dominican and in particular with two notable scholars, Father Athanasius Weisheipl, OP (who went from the Dominican House of Studies in River Forest, Illinois to the Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto) and the esteemed Aquinas scholar, theologian and historian, Father M. D. Chenu, OP. 

Scholars have debated for decades whether Jesus referred to himself as “the son of God.” I agree with those who conclude no. Jesus, as Walter Wink demonstrates, most likely understood and spoke of himself in the tradition of the prophet Ezekiel, as “the son of man,” or “the human one”.

Who is Donald Trump?  As our nation prepares for another contentious presidential election seven months from now, the cult and menace of Donald Trump continue to loom large on the horizon.  It would be hard to imagine a more dishonest, corrupt, and unfit candidate for President of the United States. 

I doubt anyone who reads Progressing Spirit believes there is a supernatural god called God who hands out parcels of land to this people or that. Yet many continue to use the word “god” to name something they believe in, which is not a supernatural being who hands out parcels of land to this people or that.

The chronology of the week is where the difficulty originates. Most Christians believe that first Jesus was crucified, and then he rose from the dead. The reality is that first came the resurrection and then the crucifixion.  This is crucial.  

A dominant message, at least in Western media, is that we deserve better and we will get there.  For the profanely privileged or perpetually oppressed, modernity and capitalism peddle fixes for all, if we just vote right. 

When I studied the resurgence of life after the world’s five previous extinction events — the Ordovician-silurian, Devonian, Permian-triassic, Triassic-jurassic, and Cretaceous-tertiary — I felt like I was witnessing an Easter-morning resurrection.

“The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” If you did not know already, it will not surprise you to know that quote is from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 

This Valentine’s Day, I pay homage to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1924 novel “Dark Princess” because it highlights the least talked about subject then and now: Black love.

This is an excerpt from my book Dry Bones and Holy Wars released by Orbis Books in 2021.

A prominent theme of U.S. American pop culture over the past decade has been fascination with a “zombie apocalypse.”

What better time than February 12th and Charles Darwin’s birthday (by rights, one of the most important days on your Liturgical Calendar) to turn our thoughts once again to the critical role Progressive Christians have as a defense against those who think subverting science somehow promotes their religion.

The situation is complicated. Churches are not supposed to endorse candidates. Indeed, many churches have members who support Trump. Some members place more faith in Trump than they do in Jesus. Yes, literally.

If progressive Christians pride themselves on radical truth-telling, then our time has come, and it will be dangerous. .. what will happen to those of us who have long-held unpopular and unorthodox religious beliefs?

When I think about my parents dying, emotions are quick to the surface, tears arise, and my heart squeezes. Death is one thing we all experience, and yet, it is the scariest, most traumatic thing we face as humans.

  It is no secret that institutional religion in the West finds itself in decline.  There are as many people identifying as “Nones” in the US today as there are Roman Catholics or Baptists, the two largest denominations in the country.  And both of the latter are hemorrhaging numbers along with other mainline denominations.  It […]

The church must create places for dialog and it must do so before it is too late. This winter and next spring the various churches must organize discussions about who we are as the body politic and how we want to live.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents both dangers and benefits and when viewed from a progressive Christian perspective, it prompts ethical and moral considerations.

I find that the perseverating mind commences before the fifth breath is even drawn. With a bullet train of thoughts underway, the nervous system is stimulated and sometimes already pumping your body with cortisol.

Ever since the first mind countenanced an unknown source of benevolence, religion has held us together as powerfully as it has driven us apart.

What deeply concerns me about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is “what’s it all going to look like/ feel like on the other side”–when the violence has stopped?

We who get to be alive right now are living in the sixth great age of extinctions. We passed planetary overshoot a while ago and the ecological and societal effects are irreversible. This is the doom some speak of.

In the majority of Christian churches every Easter and frequently around Christmas, we hear scripture reading proclaiming, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them, light has shined,” and I have to say, it really bothers me.

It is essential for progressive Christians to remember that the Bible emerged from the voices of an oppressed and marginalized people, intended to empower and uplift those facing adversity.

I write this essay at the start of the most recent round of intense violence in a location on the planet that many Christians refer to as “The Holy Land.” At least during this week, that land is anything but holy. I visited Israel and the Palestinian-controlled reservations within it in November 1995.

Granted, some denominations have published “supplements” with more modern music, but way too many have also bent to internal denominational pressure and included a plethora of hopelessly counter-productive praise choruses.

While many political operatives are trying to inch away from Trump, his everlasting white Evangelical base- churchgoers and voters- loves him, comprising approximately 60 percent of the Republican presidential primary electorate.

I have spent my life working on the inside of organized religion, even though my love/hate relationship with most God-talkers makes me an outsider.

The experience of the sacred is not an easy thing to define. It is outside of human terms and metaphors. It lives beyond the binaries and outside of boxes. There is no scientific definition of the experience of the sacred. 

Along with climate change and the move from religion to spirituality, another sign of our times is the rise of the G word and the F word alive and well in high places.  I am speaking of course of Greed and Fascism.

The transition from a Medieval to an Enlightenment way of thinking does not come easily. When I was a kid in the Norwegian American Lutheran Church, a bigger-than-life portrait of Jesus praying in Gethsemane was stationed over the altar, a Sunday reminder that his all-important death, soon to come, was our salvation. Jesus loved us, this we knew because the Bible told us so. And the Bible did not lie.

The Bible is a mirror.  In it, we see the structure of our psyches.  We see the scaffolding of our spirituality.  What makes the Bible holy is not that it is the “word of God”, but rather that so many of its passages offer such breathtakingly vivid reflections of the journeys of our souls.

If you’re a mainline Christian, you likely experienced liturgy even if you are of a less liturgical tradition than the Episcopal or Presbyterian churches. And very possibly, even if you don’t know what it is, you’ve been steeped in it.

the term ethical grace emphasizes the importance of the choices we make in our lives every day to support the goodness of life on earth. Every day, we make choices that matter.

When current events and self-perpetuating systems pin me in the extractive, enslaving, short-sighted story, there are 3 practices that help me to listen for divine guidance and to re-engage in the love story’s emerging plot. 

Folks, this is serious stuff. In fact, managing human-aggravated global warming and climate change is the single most important moral matter of our generation.

I’d even go as far as to say the modern version of Dominionism, that’s now called Christian Nationalism, is nothing like the teachings of the man who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

A majority of those who are now identifying as “Progressive Christians” are converts, so to speak, those fleeing other Christian traditions that had no real knowledge of Progressive Christianity.

Hooray! Yet another Christian Nationalist effort to strangle American values has gone out with a whimper. This time, it was a Texas Senate Bill that, if passed, would have required the 10 Commandments to be displayed prominently in every classroom in the state.

Here we are, immersed in a swirl of biospheric breakdown and societal strife that isn’t going away; in fact, it’s getting worse. The darkness and distress cannot be passed off as the wrath of an angry God. Rather, we ourselves are at cause, and these are the real end times.

There’s been a lot of conversation recently about whether we still need to use the term “progressive” as a qualifier for Christian.  As a movement, we’ve been using the label for about 3 decades, and with so many cultural shifts, it’s only natural to raise the question of whether it still fits.

Just when you thought things could not get worse, the Southern Baptists have declared that not only can women not be pastors, or anyone in a “position of authority over men,” but that SBC churches already led by women should be purged from the denomination.

Systemic racism and oppression of marginalized folk’s experience is ingrained in all of us and in every system. Even if every person became anti-racist and radically inclusive, our systems would still be a huge barrier to the liberation and equality of all.

The facts emerging about the future of organized religion and institutional Christianity in North America are quite sobering indeed.

The East-West spiritual encounter has been profoundly formative for progressive Christianity.  Experiencing the meditative practices of the East has inspired us to explore the previously neglected contemplative tradition of our faith. 

If you’re on a quest for the afterlife, you’ve plenty of options. Heaven, Nirvana, Paradise; She’ol, Limbo, Purgatory; Jahannam, Hell, the Chinvat Bridge to Darkness.

Christian nationalists – who are overwhelmingly white – think they are privileged and that their privileged status comes from God.  Historically, they see the United States as the new Israel, a nation designated by God as a shining light on a hill to the rest of the world.  

Ahead of Pentecost, the month of May offers International Labor Day, Beltane, and Mother’s Day (United States).  Each one is ripe with spirituality, and combined, they invite us to choose one another, to look out for one another’s wellbeing, and to move continually toward the kin-dom of God.

We live in a world defined by the cheapness of human life, indeed, all life. Migrants and refugees are treated no better than the Amazon rainforest. And yet, as entanglement shows us and as the tolling bell reminds us, all is One.

There. I said it. I know I’m not the first, and I surely won’t be the last. It’s time to embrace and promote. My way of proclaiming the good news of psychedelic plant medicines as part of our salvation and healing is writing.

Namasté: “The Divine in me honors the Divine in you.” In my way of seeing it, namasté includes the understanding that we all are one.

Progressive faith communities are rightfully skeptical of the language of “evangelism.” In modern history, the word has come to mean something like “forceful conversion” rather than a demonstration of and an invitation to the way of Jesus.

Christianity is the only major religion where many followers believe the death of their founder is more important than his life.

It has been said that words make worlds. And if this is true, that what we say and how we say it matters. If this is true, language is sacred. For in its origins language would be the Self-expression, not just of the human species—but of the world itself.

The Bible is replete with stories of various gender identities in God’s people. These biblical stories affirm that we all are wonderfully made and affirm our God-given right to live them out loud.

Strangely, this critique of the death of church as spawned by progressives is really another way of saying that we failed to remain intellectually dishonest about how we got the Bible, what it means to call it our flawed but irreplaceable Story of Origin, and what scholars have now shown us about the enormous gap between faith as developed doctrine and faith as discipleship–a commitment to being followers of Jesus, not worshippers of Christ.  We may be a lot smaller, but like leaven in the loaf, we may also be more subversive.

Let me say that again for the people in the back. I’m tired of giving money to charities. I’ve served the church in development and parish life for over 20 years. I don’t believe giving is wrong. The Bible tells us God loves a cheerful giver and infers that we can’t out give God. So why do I say I’m tired of giving to charities?

Why is a Chenu Institute and a new book about him such good news for progressive Christians today?  Because he was a progressive and courageous theologian throughout his life and was unafraid to break the glass in so many areas of culture and religion including theological education. 

We began with a description of human nature and used that to try to understand who Jesus was and how he was able to impact people, an analysis that bypasses much of the traditional theology about who and what he was.

The people behind HeGetsUs don’t get him.  But that doesn’t prevent us from using their campaign to help folks get who Jesus really was – and making his compassionate personality the welcoming face of our progressive faith communities. 

What will happen if we disappear? Not “we” as in Earth’s upright and most capable digit-users, though I’m sure we’ll deal with that over the course of time, but “we” as in progressive thinkers in the church. What will happen if we disappear?

I don’t know about you, but in recent times, I can hardly bear to watch the news.  It’s simply too depressing.  Gun violence continues to spin out of control with scant hope of any sensible resolution in sight. 

“Where are Americans finding meaning in their lives? How are they marking the passing of sacred time? Where are they building pockets of vibrant communities?

I lost a very dear friend the day after Christmas.

I look, out of habit, out of longing, out of love, really, but he is not there. It is as if his singular space – the very soft shape of kindness within my world – has been cut out.

“Good orthodoxy leads to good orthopraxy” is a common aphorism wielded among conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. It’s frequently worded in a more aggressive manner: “without proper orthodoxy, there can be no proper Christian discipleship.”

Few progressive Christians believe that God is something we can truly ever fully understand. Yet, in constantly choosing to anthropomorphize God, we provide ourselves with fertile mental ground for believing we are doing just that.

At the heart of the Christian faith is the central command of Jesus to love God by loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. In other words, the precursor to effectively loving God and effectively loving others is to build a healthy rhythm of self-love.

The following is Part 2 of two columns drawn from an interview with Rachel Laser, President of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

The following is Part 1 of two columns drawn from an interview with Rachel Laser, President of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, December 1st, 2022. It has been edited for length and focus.

Advent is a season especially attuned to the Darkness, and it’s rhythms—not primarily the light. For the Darkness has a strange luminosity all its own, but our eyes must readjust.

African Americans are still disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic. And the epidemic is heavily concentrated in urban enclaves like Boston, Detroit, New York, Newark, Washington, D.C., and the Deep South.

For the last six weeks, my congregation in Norman, Oklahoma, has been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book, Holy Envy:  Finding God in the Faith of Others.

Thanksgiving 2022.  There is much to be grateful for; and much to be concerned about. 

Mainline Protestants were part of America’s most successful form of Christianity until the tide began to turn in the late sixties and early seventies, and now, they are no longer the successful majority.

The history of the church in the first century is both well-hidden and well-studied, and no narrative is guaranteed to be true. The period demands our attention because what really happened then is absolutely crucial to our understanding of both Jesus and the subsequent 2000-plus years of those who would follow him.

The Big Lie has settled the question of whether or not politics belongs in the pulpits of progressive churches in America.  We’ve got no choice but to speak out and take a stand for the Democrats because the Republican Party has devolved into a cabal that is undermining the institutions upon which our religious freedom depends. 

As I write this, 2022 is in its final quarter providing an opportunity to reflect on the tenth anniversary of the worst year of my life. And one of the best. Reviewing our lives is always complicated, isn’t it? Let me share with you.

In the Northern hemisphere, we are in the season of Fall and harvest.  It is also the time when a number of cultures and traditions encourage communion with our benevolent ancestors, saints, and spiritual teachers.

I no longer practice in the field of nutrition. The farther I went with it, the more deeply I realized that the field is rife with Diet Culture and toxic beauty standards, as well as ableism and health-shaming.

What such people meant by this is that they feared that the era of privilege and power for straight, white, wealthy, capitalist men might soon pass unless it becomes vigorously defended.

“President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man – The Christ.” That’s the title of a book that is pictured in a meme making its way around social media. While it might sound like some kind of satirical production, it is not.

Living with Holy Mystery is the spiritual schooling of the soul. The method of the schooling is the spiritual practices that teach us how to become embodiments of the Source: meditation; spiritual exploration; breath, body, and movement; and liturgy.

I realized I was suffering, creating my own internal storm because of what I feared would come to be, or more accurately, how I would feel when this possibility came to be. It felt like the storm was all around me but really it was within me.

You’ve heard it said again and again- “We’re living in unprecedented times”. There’s extreme polarization, increased bigotry, emboldened racists, and virtual mobs seeking to cancel those who don’t align perfectly with the new orthodoxies of whichever side of the aisle you identify with

Earlier this summer, I was called out as a heretic and accused of “sitting on Satan’s lap” courtesy of the Institute for Religion and Democracy (the fundamentalist think tank behind the schisms of many of our mainline denominations).

I very much appreciated Brian McLaren’s recent column, Thanks Presiding Bishop Curry, and his thoughtful exploration of the bishop’s advice to find a voice that is non-partisan, and why this is easier said than done. 

What might a Creed that represented Jesus’ teachings more, and Constantine’s less, look like?

In his speech, Bishop Curry twice emphasized the need to find a voice that is non-partisan (“this is not partisan,” “not a partisan voice”). We all know why he needed to say this.

It has been shown that wealth actually changes the structure of a person’s brain, destroying a sense of empathy for others while at the same time creating a sense of entitlement.

We are becoming aware of what we are: Boundless love is the Source of life and the longing of the soul. As we live from the Source, we become more curious about life, which means we question, ceaselessly.

Now, more than ever, is the time to express our faith forthrightly, publicly, and invitationally.

While at theological college, a challenge seized with an eager ferocity, was the imperative attributed to theologian Karl Barth that we preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

I write this essay in the wake of a slate of recent rulings by the US Supreme Court that many progressive Christians, and progressive persons in general, find most troubling.

Recently, I was in consultation with a colleague who is First Nation Cree. Throughout the conversation, there was a steady stream of confidence, curiosity, and hope.  Really smiling at one point, my colleague said, “I’m an eternal optimist who comes from a history of despair.”

What is a heart alive with compassion and joy and spontaneity?  A heart not continually weighed down by drivenness, anger, and fear? A heart at rest?

The Mystery of Life only allows us to move forward. No matter how much we cling to what was or how much we resist, change is inevitable.

In his book “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology”. The Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng says, “God is the very manifestation of a love that is so extreme that it dissolves existing boundaries.” So, it seems to me, living a life that dismantles existing boundaries is the very definition of being in relationship with God.

I, along with many other progressive Christian ministers I know, have grown increasingly cynical about our faith. We no longer feel that the faith that we’ve evolved to embrace has much of a bearing on our daily lives or an impact on the world.

When I first read Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, it changed my life. In disbelief, I read portions of it over and over again and looked at the date. I read it AGAIN and thought, “What?” How in the world could he have preached this in 1922 and it STILL be controversial?!

Let’s be honest about the fear that is now driving the culture wars and have brought us to the precipice of losing our democracy.  White men on the right fear they are losing everything to the brown and black barbarians at the gate.

We don’t know when Jesus was born, but we do know when he died. His birth was linked to existing pagan festivals celebrating the winter solstice, but his death can be dated relatively specifically, and occurred during the Passover Festival, Jerusalem, early April in year 30.

I walked out of our church in ritual silence with the procession at twilight and was met—stunned—by the radiant face of the nearly full moon. I started to weep. Especially tired this particular Maundy Thursday, I was hit by the welling up of unprocessed emotion from a particularly hard year.

Not only does our species do great evil with our vast creativity and intelligence, we also do amazing positive things as well.  We are capable of the Awesome as well as the Awful.

If Jesus was right when he said, in his inaugural address (as found in Luke 4), that the Spirit of God’s agenda is to help the oppressed, the weak, the broken-hearted, those with (in Thurman’s words) their backs against the wall, then no wonder many people are struggling with their religious identity.

  Over the last four years I’ve fallen in love with the banjo. It has been an interesting journey to take up this instrument. I’ve heard friends and family make comments about how strange it is to see a black woman with a banjo. A few have even expressed mild disapproval of seeing me with […]

All of us at some point will be approached by evangelical Christians attempting to convince us to become their kind of Christians. What’s the most Christian way we can respond to them?  — whether we are Christians or not?

As if we don’t already have enough problems in this country, the last few years have seen us slipping closer and closer to becoming a “post-truth society.” Facts just don’t seem to matter anymore.

We evolve through the work we do in the course of our too-short and too-harried days. Embracing that for which we are grateful is our evolution toward joy. Witnessing to that which went well is our evolution toward self-worth. Acknowledging that which we regret is an evolution toward wholeness. These are the things that our faith traditions have offered us.

Race is a social construct and not a biological fact. However, the deleterious effects of America’s dominant black/white racial paradigm excludes other racial groups whose skin color and phenotype complicate the racist model.

  I write this to you, my Progressive Christian siblings, on a Monday morning during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I had written an entirely different article to submit, but I find myself following a different direction. Together, we are feeling such dismay over this newest war, and finding ourselves provoked to worry, fear, anxiety; […]

Although the intelligence indicated a Russian invasion was imminent, most of the people of the world, including Ukraine, continued on with life as usual. Then, in an instant, Russian tanks started rolling into a peaceful, non-threatening neighboring country, triggering the first such move of its kind in Europe since WW2.

There is so much humility, discipline, curiosity and vitality in what the Creator asks of us – anything but monotonous!  In the Abrahamic origin story, there are some similarities as it centers Creation first and begins in a garden. 

“We belong to each other,” as indigenous teachers have said. So, how do we create a bigger table with every voice in mind and make sure every one is there when we start to wrestle with solutions?

There are certain dynamics taking place today that may remind us of dynamics that took place early in the last century. I suggest that pondering such similarities is not only warranted – but needed.

  Race plays a profound role in all aspects of life in the United States. When you stop to think about it, that is absolutely astounding considering that race, at least biologically speaking, doesn’t actually exist.   You see, for hundreds of years scientists assumed race was a biological reality because people look different to […]

My thesis is simply this: A comet actually is heading our way. We ourselves set it in motion millennia ago. But only recently have scientists, echoing longstanding indigenous warnings, charted its course and voiced the alarm. Its name is Anthropocentrism and these are the End Times because human-centeredness will prove to be nearly as devastating as the comet in the movie.

When fragile hope is on the line, people will do anything to maintain it- even revolt against the very democracy they claimed to love.

  When Christians gather for liturgy; when we assemble for saying prayers, singing songs, hearing sermons; when we come together for Eucharist, it is simply assumed that we are engaging in worship. The last stanza of “An Affirmation of Faith” in the beautifully written A New Zealand Prayer Book, states: “You are our God. We […]

Last year, at the height of the pandemic (or is this the height of the pandemic?), a clergy colleague asked me to write a new version of the birth of Jesus that might preserve the radical message of Luke but translate it into more contemporary metaphors.

Hanukkah and Christmas are both stories of promise and hope in a time of darkness.  And both speak to miracles or marvels. 

The largest human psychological event/experiment in history is happening as you read, it involves everyone, and has momentous consequences. To learn the details, tune in and watch “Our Social Dilemma”, a Netflix documentary featuring young former top executives of social media companies such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram.

In my travels and speaking, people often ask me “what do we do with ______?” questions. The blank is most often filled in with a doctrinal issue like hell, creationism, original sin, inerrancy, atonement theory, and the like.

The United Nations, in partnership with the West African country of Ghana, marked 2019 as “The Year of Return”. It was a year to honor the 400-year stint of resilience of the people of the African Diaspora. 400 years since the first stolen Africans arrived in the Americas as part of the system of chattel slavery.

Like progressive Christians today, Simone Weil knew God as love.  Not just as warm, fuzzy, romantic, or familial love.  Rather as agape love, which embraces all beings and things – and all experiences, including suffering.  Communion with the divine was, for her, manifested in attention

In the spirit of our connected struggles for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this Thanksgiving,  we should not solely focus on the story of Plymouth Rock. Instead, as Americans, we should focus on creating this nation as a solid rock that rests on a multicultural and democratic foundation. 

The number of people whose death would be felt around the world is limited. Bishop John Shelby Spong was surely one of them. It is impossible to determine how far or wide his influence has and will continue to be.

The following is Part 2 of a series drawn from an interview with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity on September 9th, 2021. It has been edited for length and focus.

The most ancient path I know is the ecological one.  Creation is an intricate living system that honors life, death and rebirth within Earth’s natural cycles; where reciprocity is honorable, and all life is sacred.  We humans, who happen to be mammals (but also a bit of a virus), have trouble remembering the path of Creation.

Our planet is not well. That’s an understatement. The Earth is in a state of crisis. Human aggravated global warming/Climate Change is a real and present danger.

Jack experienced God as the source of all life. There is no duality within God, there is only sacred oneness. And so he reminded us that if God is the source of all life, then the best way to worship God is to live fully.

Like so many of the injustices and inequities revealed by the pandemic, evangelical Christianity’s deepest values have also been unmasked.  Now that more and more businesses are requiring those who return to work to get the vaccine, people who have already decided not to get the shot, often by feasting on misinformation, have also decided that their “personal freedom” trumps any biblical injunction to be our sister and brother’s keeper.  But that is not all.

As I read the first Creation story and put it in conversation with the big bang theory, there is a message that comes through loudly: Creation comes from unbinding everything in order to give it meaning. I would go as far as to say the best, most remarkable creations always do just that, unbind things, breakdown barriers and boundaries.

The following is Part 1 of a series drawn from an interview with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity on September 9th, 2021. It has been edited for length and focus.

Earth is 71% water. When we humans are born, we are made of approximately this same percentage. We are made in Earth’s image; created within Earth’s watery imagination. Born into life through a series of cosmic processes of explosive passion and grace.

Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 16, 1931 – September 12, 2021

Today I ask a question: “Is it possible to understand 21st century spirituality without looking at today’s art?”  And if so, to whom should we turn? I highly recommend turning to artist/activist Jennifer Hereth who, during the recent pandemic enclosure time, looked back at her life’s work as an artist and teacher of art and activist who has visited Syrian refugee centers and Sri Lanka war-torn villages as well as the rugged streets of Chicago where she lives to gift us with a spiritual testament for our times. 

Sometimes, the deeper we dig, the more profoundly aware we become that at the center of reality are dimensions that defy linear and logical analysis. Whether it be in the realm of science, quantum or cosmic, or in the realm of metaphysics, oftentimes mystery is the ultimate order of the day. Leaving science to the scientists, I would like to here consider two theological questions that defy logical analysis, one aspect of the nature of God and one aspect of the nature of human beings.

In reality, the world around us is an infinite rainbow of nuance, complexity, and brilliance! Unlike other animals and living creatures, people are as unique as there are infinite shades of colors in this world. More so, even. We come with these spirits full of experiences and lessons, we come with unique fingerprints, DNA, personalities, likes and dislikes, smells and textures, skin tones, sexualities, body types, talents, and ideas.

If you believe, as I do, that the world needs a vital alternative to regressive and right-wing Christianity, then you should join me in raising the alarm — and calling for radical action among forward-leaning Christians.

It’s been an interesting experiment to consider my attention as a form of currency. Though I’m not exactly thrilled with the capitalist framework, I’ve benefited from considering my focus as a resource, and my general headspace as a bank of its own. How I “spend” from it matters not just for myself, but also for the people around me.

Beliefs are a funny thing to try to pin down. If we are honest, they are slippery and largely unconscious. When enough of them get mixed together in a large enough group they build up force like a gathering storm. It makes you wonder, are any beliefs actually rational?

I was recently asked:  “What should be the mandate for today’s Black Churches? ” I believe one of the mandates for today’s Black Churches is to address its ongoing struggle with the spectrum of human sexuality.

One of the many ways to read the Bible is to view it as God’s autobiography.

In Canada, it wasn’t just the Roman Catholic Church involved. Both the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church also participated in the residential schools program which, for decades, forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families for the purpose of educating them into the dominant white, Christian culture of the country.

In Her 4.5 billion years of being a planet, Earth has known great drama illustrated in superfluous gestures of creativity and supreme acts of destruction.  If we used only this as our backdrop for religion what would our religion consist of? 

I think that that the apostle Paul has gotten an undeserved bum rap by many progressives and that it is good, right, and well for Christian pastors to preach from the letters of the apostle Paul.

Could it be, as some psychologists suggest, that ‘pure’ altruism doesn’t exist? According to them, when we help strangers, there is always some benefit to us personally, even if we’re not aware of it. This could include gaining respect from others, helping us feel good about ourselves, or for some Christians it could increase our chances of getting into heaven.

My perspective is that I am a Christian, who believes I must examine political and economic decisions in the light of those values.  The basis upon which I make political and economic judgments is that I believe every person, rich and poor, Anglo-Saxon and African, Hispanic and Asian, male and female, gay and straight must to be treated with the dignity of being a child of God. 

Over three weeks before the first rocket was fired from Gaza, and war erupted yet again between Israel and Palestine, something happened that was hardly mentioned in the press, but explains so much of the terror and humiliation that Palestinians face every day from Israel.

In this moment of history everything has changed. Over the course of a few months, most of us went from living hybrid virtual lives to almost completely virtual lives. Church services moved online for both megachurches and churches of twelve, giving equal access to the masses to churches, regardless of their size.

Might the global coronavirus emergency we are living through prove to be a kind of shamanistic initiation that is meant to wake us up as a species?  Is facing climate change and extinction another such initiation? What are the most essential shifts in consciousness that our species must undergo if we are to survive? 

In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1945 that the Western world was on the precipice of a new era, an era without religion. God, as the “answer” to unsolvable questions, was continually being put out of a job as science continually extended the boundaries of human knowledge.

I think about Mother Mary and her pride alongside her anguish as her son became more and more himself. A self that threatened the powers that be. A self that would hang for being who he was.  What must she have felt when he told her, I must go out into the world and share these teachings. I must share with the world this great love I have experienced. 

So, what’s the measure of a “genuine” progressive Christian? For some, it’s proficiency in some obscure spiritual discipline. For others, it’s engagement in the work of social justice. Whatever we are, the media seems to believe the 2020s may provide a leg-up for those who are advocates and practitioners of a post-modern, post-evangelical, post-liberal, post-Christian approach to Jesus following.

Like many, I grew up in a two-tier universe. The lower natural tier was physical, temporal, and ever-changing. The higher supernatural tier was spiritual, eternal, and changeless. God, the Holy Spirit, and human souls or spirits were in the higher tier. Human bodies, all nonhuman creatures, and all matter and energy were in the lower tier.

While I am not personally optimistic about the idea of opening things up with the speed I see in my local community, it is happening. Without much help I find myself questioning if I will be more like the Osprey or the wasp.

This past Lent I practiced lying fallow. I avoided news and social media. I wrote all my Lenten liturgies ahead of time. I gave myself permission to do the bare minimum of work (I’m a pastor and parent, so this part was flexible). I imagined myself as a field, unplanted in a year of Jubilee.

Entertaining Long’s sexual addiction as a believable explanation for the killings diverts attention from his acts of intentional xenophobia and racialized misogyny. The fetishization of Asian American and Pacific Island women has constantly made their lives expendable to sex traffickers and men’s violent fantasies.

There are many questions that mainstream science can’t answer, at least at the moment.  Ethical and moral questions, such as: who should get the Covid vaccine first?  And how can such a prioritization be made understandable and acceptable to the public?  Science provides data upon which such judgments can be made, but ultimately we can’t trust science itself to sort them out. 

Why, in all of this relatedness, do we feel so disconnected?  Depleted?  Empty?  Because we mistakenly turn that which is divinely relational, into something inhumanely transactional.  And, to make this sin livable, we turn our heads and forget our neoteny.  Children don’t allow this sort of behavior.  We are born into relatedness and unity. 

Using the word “god” to conjure an all-powerful deity with biblically-proportioned prejudices and condemnations is dramatically different from using the word “god” to call us to a “no matter what” sort of love. I talk about this a lot. About ditching archaic language. About reading more than just the Bible or not reading the Bible at all.

Lent is a time where we’re invited to engage in deepened soul-searching. I’ve been feeling called to search the soul of progressive Christianity.

The Bible has a political agenda. Even with all the different writers who contributed to different books, there is a clear biblical bias against the powerful using their places of authority to step on those who are already suffering. That’s political.

Let’s be clear, this is an audacious idea.  Writing a book about God is an audacious project.  In fact, claiming to know anything about God is more than audacious—it is intellectual blasphemy.  So, to begin, let me be clear.  I have no idea what I am talking about.  

Because I choose to remain within the church, I have to ask myself regularly “why do I believe what I believe?” and also “why do I stick around?” Why do I choose to stay put when the church has caused so much harm?

There is – and ought to be – plenty of criticism of Patriarchy at this time in history.  But for that very reason there needs to be a critical understanding of what it is – and is not.

From Ezekiel to Jesus to the voices of the gospels, the proclamation is clear: civilization will not, indeed cannot, survive if wealth and power, and therefore food and shelter, are in the possession of but a few. Equally so, democracy will not and cannot survive if the bullies are allowed free reign.

My church was my extended family. And in my years of searching, I have yet to find a church like it, although I am sure they are out there.  So, why did I feel like, at 29 years old, that I was done with Christianity?

As one who’s had to endure a career in a denomination whose global trademark is a burning cross, it once again raised the question in my mind of how the cross, burning or otherwise, had become a symbol of hate and White Supremacy.

  I grew up in a 6-day creation sector of Christianity. Evolution, we were taught, was a Satanic deception to make us lose our faith. It was a banana peel on the slippery slope to hell; and it led me to my first theological crisis when I was 12 years old. I’d been that kid […]

I feel a small bit like the woman who threw her last penny into the offering pot in the temple. This article is my penny, this column is the offering pot, the readership is the Temple. Because this is the most precious penny I have at the moment.

The year 2020 has been a stressful one. With George Floyd’s death as an inflection point about race and racism in America, an unprecedented presidential election, and social unrest during an ongoing pandemic with a rising death toll, something is deeply broken in America’s body politic. 

Such is the looking at the figures in the crèche scene at the birth of Jesus. The crèche is a window into the eternal quality of the now, an icon of the divine point of view. It is the slack-jawed, timeless, aimless, free, worshipful Awe that is Love that is God. 

There are 3 parts of Jesus’s birth story that we want to open here, like gifts.  There are many parts of this story that, once unwrapped, hold great truth and importance including dreams, angels and what was going on for Joseph. 

It has been a burdensome year and it is likely to get worse before it is over.

When you gaze up into the night sky, perhaps from the sateen darkness of Glacier National Park, or the cozy vestibule of your backyard, what do you see? Pin-wheeling galaxies? Endless expanse of interstellar space? Familiar special neighbors such as Orion or Ursa Major?

“Man [Humankind] can’t become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him of all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.”

Too many whites argue that slavery is a thing of the past for which present day whites are not responsible. In the previous two essays, I tried to debunk that myth. It is the cause of so much pain today for black and white Americans.

The origins of the word surrender come from the French roots for “to give back,” and “over.” And that is exactly what surrender is. It is not laying down our arms, it is not choosing peace over justice, it is not breathing deeply and meditating our way out of our pain. True surrender speaks to our relationship with our common mother, the Earth. It means to give back to her, over and over again, above and beyond what we think we are capable of giving. 

Religion prefers a definable God. By definition, one of the purposes of religion is to draw us closer to God. The way religion has typically been practiced, this implies some degree of “knowing” God. To know God we must be able to define God. The problem is, in the act of defining God, we are limiting God.

Most people, if they know anything about Julian of Norwich, know two things. First, that she said “all things will be well, every manner of thing will be well,” a testimony to hope or what Mirabai Starr calls “radical optimism” that arises near the end of her book Showings and ought not to be understood as “spiritual bypass” or denial of suffering. Second, people have heard that she talks about the “motherhood of God” quite often.

As the leaves turn color and fall into the ground, and the migratory patterns and bird songs slowly shapeshift into a dirge, as the sap sinks into its source, we might listen closely to our bodies and psyche. If we allow ourselves the space to pay attention we can feel the shift towards the liminal time of fall. Fall in-between the erotic vigor and embodiment of summer, and the pale, dormant latency of winter.

The documentary Africa’s Great Civilizations is an in-depth study of the world’s first humans, the cradle of civilization, and the birthplace of the Christian religion. Episode one begins a journey through anthropological and scientific discoveries where viewers learn that Africa is the genetic home of all currently living humanity.

We all are painfully aware that we in the US are living in a time of extreme violence and anxiety. What we may not know is that Jesus lived in such a time as well, and the parallels are quite striking.

Often when we think of radicals today, we think of religious extremists or we associate a negative connotation with it. But the word radical actually means far-reaching fundamental transformation. And fundamental transformation is exactly what we need today, individually and collectively.

Recently, a half-dozen young people in our small town organized a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration. The march was seen by some as an intrusion of threatening other-worldly politics into our predominantly (99.8%) white town and riled up a lot of emotional responses on social media.

When I write as a white man about calling for reparations, this is the source and origin of the damages for  which we bear responsibility and for which we seek repair. The question I want to ask in this essay is this: how far removed from that source are we. Is it a distant relic of the past from which we are now utterly disconnected

We could describe the pain we’re in right now as the colonial anesthesia wearing off.  In epic fashion, events of the past many months have connected all the threads of the story: white supremacy and racism, detention centers and prisons, militarism and policing, the wealth of a few at the expense of  essential workers, broken healthcare, hurricanes, derechos, and wildfires, and certainly others.

Recently, I received an email from a reader who asked, “Hi Brian. I would love to know your thoughts on speaking with close family members who are active or retired police officers during this time. I’m seeing so many black activists and white allies calling for the police force to be defunded and dismantled.

I’m thinking a lot about this moment.  Under 70 days until the most important Presidential Election arguably of all time, close to six months into an unprecedented global pandemic, increasing racial uprisings, increasing inequalities, anxieties, looming questions, delayed and potent grief. 

One of the most fundamental postures of any mature spirituality is that of humility, and yet on both the left and the right it seems that humility is always in short supply. Throughout human history we have craved to know the answers to the big questions that seem to endlessly loom above us: Why are we here? Who are we? Where are we going? Is there a purpose to any of this?

Of all the things white allies were willing to activate for, through decades of civil rights movements, reparations were the one thing that even the most committed white leaders have avoided talking about, much less fully committing to.

John Lewis, the ‘conscience of Congress’, preached a lived theology and activism of “good trouble.” Good trouble was the work of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and it was an expression of Lewis’s faith. The immediacy of his “good trouble” was heard in his jeremiads, inviting all to action. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” Lewis repeatedly said throughout his lifetime.

In my own movement through Christianity I was petrified of the idea of the rapture. The ever-imposing threat of the Apocalypse. It seemed like every year produced mountains of evidence that the plagues had been unleashed, and the prophecies of Revelation were being fulfilled. With some distance from the center of that particular flavor of Christianity, I have noticed that the world is always ending.

I write in the context of the twin global realities of Covid-19; and the increasing rejection of toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and white supremacy – including a growing rejection of religions which are perceived as promoting and maintaining those poisons.

White supremacy, in its many systemic forms, continues to keep us all bound. Pandemic or not, the work of Liberation through anti-racism and decolonization continues. For people of faith, this work includes breaking free from supremacy informed theology.

A democracy is only able to function and prosper if its diverse citizenry shares a common sense of what is good. A political common good, however, is made possible by the presence of common ground; this ground is the Reality of Being, the Essence of all that is. Without spiritual common ground, which is Being, the fragile political common good is a chimera, evident in the cultural blindness to and destruction of the beauty of George Floyd.

It seems to me that, now, in the fourth month of the pandemic, we need to reach down deep for spiritual, emotional, and contemplative resources. The best one I know is gratitude.

My initial intent in writing this column was to look at how the early church lost the message of Jesus, but both the pandemic and climate change seemed more urgent, demanding immediate attention. Then I realized that lurking behind all of them was the dark but pervasive shadow of society’s rich and powerful, those who expand and protect their interests at any cost.

The world has shifted on its axis since my last article appeared in Progressing Spirit. As I write, the number of COVID-19 deaths has passed 400,000, a number that shrinks from the reality experienced around the globe. As countries attempt to reopen their economies, anti-racism protests are sweeping the globe. Immune to neither challenge, we in Canada are little more than a quiet simmer when compared to the legitimate rage being expressed across America and around the world.

I’m really interested in how we, and by we I mean seekers, teachers, preachers, clergy, laymen, mystics, atheists and everything in between, think and talk about the divine feminine.

One of the “ultimate questions” humans like to pose is this:  Why are we here?  

This might seem to be a particularly appropriate question to ask in a time of the coronavirus plague when so much is becoming uprooted, when so many are afraid and suffering and dying. 

For us faith leaders the problem is much deeper than simply ‘green-washing’ Christianity. Our habits of inattention and self-survival stand trial. The “cultural self” has become really good at shutting off the valve to feeling, that organ of perception connecting our own hearts with the heartbeat of a living World.

It is difficult to read the teachings of Jesus and come away thinking that some people deserve to have more privileges than others. We are not only suppose to love our neighbors, but we are also suppose to love our enemies – equally.

How will people of faith show up?  Will the knee jerk reactions of shock and awe at the news that African Americans are dying at alarming rates elicit advocacy and activism for long-term strategies to correct structural and systemic injustices?  Will people who claim to be Christians consider themselves “woke” because they write a check in support of a food pantry?

In two previous articles I’ve shared why the church must die, and why I believe it is or has been dying. Some of my fellow readers (People of Color, LGBTQ, differently-abled) have seen what I’ve seen, felt what I’ve felt. Others have been offended or triggered, mostly well-meaning folks of privilege who don’t want things to change. That’s just it – don’t confuse the Church with the church you’re familiar with.

To be a progressive, one must have the ability to think for oneself, to examine what they have been told and what they read. To be a progressive Christian means we find the courage to both question and to find our own authentic answer. And that takes bravery.  Let’s celebrate our bravery together! 

Since early March, a poem[i] by Kristin Flyntz has been circulating widely wherein she imagines what the Covid-19 virus might be saying.  More than once it says, “Just stop. Be still. Listen. Ask us what we might teach you about illness and healing, about what might be required so that all may be well. We will help you, if you listen.”

In the new normal that we can create together, we can lean into a truth that we are all learning in our bones thanks to this crisis: we are all connected, participants in local, regional, and global societies, living in an ecosystem that requires us to seek the common good with one another and with all our fellow creatures.

Metaphors are powerful, because they describe and prescribe our relationships with one another with so few words. Their power lies in their awesome capacity to evoke a world. Metaphors can manifest and deepen our sense of the Holy Mystery, or they can mask and distort. Oftentimes it is a mixture. But the difference is real, and it matters.

I was a Christian; I am a Christian. But it became clear to me that God speaks more than one language. Because God wants to be known, I came to believe, by any means necessary, God speaks to the hearts of humans in the ways they can hear, inviting us to come close to be seen, known and loved.

In a responsible response to the coronavirus outbreak, also known as COVID-19, church and worship services across the globe are canceled. Traditional Bible study has gone online. Sermons are watched on Zoom, and old videos of singing church choirs have popped up in my inbox. Our global engagement with one another right now is social distancing while staying connected, revealing our acts of spiritual communion. 

The below offering was inspired by a conversation with my favorite Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer and the late, great Peter Tosh. Thanks for inviting the Selah, Rabbi. Rest in Power, Peter.

Even though my context is theologically progressive, I am entangled in supremacy theology. I need to break free. I define supremacy theology as any theological framework that is propped up by systems of oppression.

Parents and caregivers, you are on the frontlines of the revolution. You are raising humans that will perpetuate white supremacy, or be actively anti-racist. You are raising humans that can break down walls rather than build them.  So stop thinking your praying has ended, or your activism decreased.

This article is a continuation of : 10 Things Smart Progressive Churches Know About Worship, Part 1. 

Modern scientists have discovered what the mystics have known to be true for centuries. Reality is an illusion. Atoms are primarily made of vast regions of empty space, objects are fundamentally non-objects but rather waves and shadow, and there is a continuous energetic exchange happening between you and those around you at all times.

Of course, it is not just a racial issue that hammers at the foundations of our social order. Or a gender identity or sexuality issue. Or political, social, or familial. It is an issue that is experienced by all of us and that undermines our self-confidence, and our willingness to be vulnerable, our ability to see what is really before us

“New personality types are created during social and spiritual crises of religious, political, or economic origin.” ~Otto Rank One hundred years ago, as the world was shaking under the pressures of the First World War, a spiritual crisis like no other in our human history, the field of Depth Psychology was born. Along with it, […]

Many people, if they hear the name Thomas Aquinas at all, may not feel that he has anything to say to today’s “progressive” religious and post-religious movement.  They would be wrong; dead wrong.

As an indigenous Messiah, Jesus was one who listened deeply to the song of Creation, to the living dialogue that is in the beginning, the heartbeat of the universe itself. In this sense, Jesus was the mythteller of the community he was forming around his own ministry of power, healing, and renewal.

You simply can’t fully follow Jesus if you aren’t willing to be political and stick out  your own neck, challenging the hypocritical power structures and leaders on behalf of the oppressed.” 

Ever since human beings began to relate their experience to one another, it has proven difficult to differentiate the facts of the story from the teller’s interpretation of the facts. Anyone paying attention to US politics today is painfully aware of this situation, but it has always been true, and it was as true in […]

Churchianity must die and it is dying. I know, that probably hurt a little to read. If it makes you feel better, it hurt to write it too. However, the sooner we accept that death is part of the cycle, we can shift into midwifing a new movement of the Jesus story.

Today, as I write this, I am feeling compassion for the white fragility out there. There’s a lot of grief connected to it. Yes, something is dying, friends. Because it must. White supremacy must die so we can all be transformed, so we can all be resurrected.

I have been a worship leader, liturgist, and musician in various church contexts for nearly 20 years, and I have ideas about how we, who are re-imagining faith and church, can proceed.

Last Spring, Greta Thunberg’s statement to the European Parliament included the phrase, “Everyone and everything needs to change.”  It’s become a mantra for me: Everyone, Everything, Me, Changing.

Many of us who grew up in fundamental spaces were taught to live in dualities: black and white, in and out, saved and unsaved. In those spaces, there isn’t liminality. There aren’t many safe spaces to ask really hard questions, to show anger toward injustice, or even to grieve when we need to grieve. We are taught to brush it off, smile, move on, trust God, and believe.

Janet – thanks so much for this question. I’ve been pondering this question too … for decades!

Let’s start by saying the obvious: Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name. It’s a title, like doctor, reverend, president, or governor.

Christianity is inherently political. The faithful path taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth was arguably just as much a political vision for the future of the Jewish people as much as it was a path to spiritual salvation.

What an existential conundrum it is for us human beings as we long for someone to see us for the truth of what we are, while at the same time fearing to be seen for the truth of what we think we are and that others might perceive. A very tiring dance.

The Christmas story is the greatest story ever told. It’s why we’re still telling it two millennia later. We’re telling it all around the world. The story of God who loves the world enough to come all the way down to be present in the world, not as a soldier, but as a teeny, tiny, vulnerable infant.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” in Luke 23:34 has always troubled me, because it is the first of the seven utterances by Jesus on the cross. I’ve been taught that the act of forgiveness is a sign of spiritual mettle and grace under fire. And, as an African American, the act of forgiveness appears to be our immediate go-to place in the face of unimaginable racial horror done to us. 

The church isn’t just dying. In many parts of the United States, it is already dead. At least, its impact is. The pews are still warm, the offering plates clanking with coins, and the bodies are present. However the church itself is wasting away and has become irrelevant.

Everything that God called forth comes from the Water, everything we know in our world today was created except for the Water, it was already here. Even among scientists there is continued debate about where Water came from, how it got here. No matter the angle, Water’s presence in our reality is a precious, life-giving mystery.

Some of the most egregious acts in civilization find their justification in Scripture, from genocide to slavery to deadly homophobia. History proves that the Bible, read with nefarious hermeneutics, in the hands of powerful figures can cause catastrophe.

It is a sad thing to close the doors of a church. Hard as it is for the congregation’s members, however, the event has a far deeper, though often unseen and uncalculated, impact on the health of the community in which that congregation was practicing its increasingly irrelevant faith. As churches age and weaken, their focus necessarily turns toward survival and away from the world outside their doors.

For most Christians, the question is, “Can you strip Jesus of his supernatural powers and still achieve salvation through Christ?” If we take the Godhead out of Jesus, what are we left with? Is there some other element that we enter into or move through by knowing him?

So what does it mean to be a warrior for beauty? In order to understand it, we must first look at what beauty is, and then we must turn toward what it means to be a warrior.

My assessment is that Christianity and its Church can either join the flow of justice or flail against its changing tides. This flow is happening with or without you. Spirit is moving, creating a path of love, equality, and peacemaking in its wake. If you are of the mind to jump in to this divine current, then I have several points of advice for you.

All nature was designed for revelation. At least that’s what indigenous peoples, the Israelites, our church Fathers, and the Celts believed. Jesus himself, like Moses and the prophets Elijah and John the Baptizer, strode deep into the heart of the world, fasting for a vision—revelation.

It seems to me that people who have a well developed and healthy spirituality will resist the concept of  tribalism. While it is true that tribalism was once an evolutionary necessity for survival, I have to believe that in modern times we should recognize that it is actually quite ridiculous as it is so rooted rooted in the illusion that some people are more valuable than others.

“What are a Bible Story or Stories that are especially pressing for today’s world?”  Clearly there are many but I have chosen one from the Hebrew Bible and one from the Christian Bible.

We know enough about politics to know when an idea’s time has come. We know enough about the principles that move and motivate people. They are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. They are those universal principles found in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: fear, safety, community, belonging, status, esteem and actualization (another word for “becoming” or, possibly, “salvation”).

It has become so easy now to feel anxious, worried or irritable by the state of things, by the frantic commotion modeled all around us, focusing on just about everything except what’s actually important. 

I recently experienced something that is the stuff of many people’s nightmares.

This was a very challenging article to write and I am going to be super vulnerable with you all, so bear with me … and I invite you to join me in a brave conversation.

I recently heard this quote on the radio: “There’s only one thing more powerful than white fear and that’s white guilt.” That statement left me questioning for days. “Could that be true,” I wondered? What does my white fear look like? What does my white guilt look like?

A shift in my geographical location was the catalyst for a life-altering shift in my theological truth system. I was in Kenya, East Africa for 10 weeks in the summer of 2013 on a missions/educational trip when I began to ask myself about the introduction of Christianity to African people, most specifically black people in America as a result of slavery. This was the first time I had ever asked myself why do I believe what I say I believe.

The Celtic tradition has a concept called “thin spaces”, geographical locations where the veil between heaven and earth, the world we live in and the realm of the Divine, seems to be remarkably thin.

But once I turned my attention to the problem of God’s maleness, I realized that I didn’t just hate white Christ, I also hated male Christ. A god who is exclusively white and male, or even predominantly white and male, is never going to be safe for people of color and/or women. Indeed, white male god is intersectional; we must be liberated from both its whiteness and maleness.

If your life were ending and you were given the chance to write a few words to encapsulate its essence, what would you say? The story wouldn’t have to be historical, or literally true, but it would need to offer an authentic window into your soul and the heart of your heart.

In two previous columns: How I Got Here and  What Am I Now?, I shared a bit about my own backstory and where I am now as a progressive Christian. In this third column, I’d like to share a bit about what I see and hope for progressive Christianity looking forward.

Both the virgin birth and physical resurrection are the pillars of the Christian faith, and many Christians struggle with both concepts.

Armed with fifteen years of exposure to critical contemporary Christian scholarship, the congregation’s leaders, rather than fire me, embraced the opportunity to explore what church beyond belief might look like. It has been a bumpy ride at times; there is no doubt about that.  Still, the work was important, and we have proven that a church built on the values of liberal Christianity neither undermines nor requires belief in a supernatural, interventionist, theistic god called God.

If people today know anything about the book of Joshua, it’s likely to be just one story: “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.” But Joshua asking God to “stop the sun in the sky” is probably a close second – and has clearly had a more dramatic influence on world history (and not in a good way).

There are countless other examples in the Bible that point to the human – earth relationship as a symbiotic mother and child.

In my previous piece, I shared a bit about my past. This piece turns to the present. I’ve just begun work on two books, the second of which is tentatively entitled, Do I Stay Christian? As I sketch out the shape and trajectory of the book, I’m thinking more deeply about why I still identify as Christian and what I think Christian can and in fact must come to mean in the decades ahead.

The wild calls. That which we associate with the wild are those ‘spontaneities’ found in ever form of existence in the natural world, that which is uncontrolled by human dominance. Wild is that feral autonomy of the more-than-human world with an agency and feathered intelligence of its own. The wild flares forth in the numinous powers of the psyche, mirroring the wild and raw powers of the universe. The wild is pure nature, that which is completely uncontrolled by human consciousness or dominance.

Now that we can just barely view the pomp and circumstance of Easter in our rearview mirrors, I’d like to talk a little about Easter. Not that Easter; not the Easter egg hunts, Easter hats, and shouts of “He is risen” kind of Easter; I want to talk about the whole of the Easter story, which reminds me that the American dream is a dream built on the back of a system of domination.

  Over the last few weeks I’ve had several ideas for articles. One of them felt so full of energy that I stayed awake until 3am writing. I’m usually fast asleep by 10pm. Period. So, being pulled from sleep and kept awake to write was significant. I’ve also committed to exercising two different forms of […]

Science and Spirituality need each other. This has always been the case—from Aristotle (who concludes his classic work on Physics with positing an Unmoved Mover) to Aquinas (who fought the fundamentalists of his day about the value of bringing science, namely Aristotle, and the scientific method of his day, namely scholasticism, into the world of faith).

Suddenly, I saw in a new light the violence of the modern era, from colonialism to Stalinism to Naziism to nuclear war to the environmental crisis. Smart people, armed with excessive and un-self-critical confidence derived from their absolutized ideologies, could commit unspeakable atrocities without having second thoughts.

A teenager in a red “Make America Great Again” hat, face-to-face with a drumming Native American elder on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial…

For all the coverage and commentary we now have of the Lincoln Memorial encounter, there are many moments we’re not shown. We will never see what was moving in the hearts of those two men as they faced one another, waiting for the other to back down, watching their expressions melt and change while feeling the heat and pressure of the mob at their back.

The progressive Christian practice, I believe, is founded on my (our) willingness to listen for and co-create the new story. And let me be clear about this word, “new.” I don’t mean the next bright and shiny object that allows me to toss the frayed one into the landfill. I mean “new,” as in emerging, fertile, and arriving with a willingness to acknowledge what has been before now.

The Church is dying. Specifically, Christianity in most Western countries is rapidly diminishing. Some 7-8,000 churches close their doors every year in the U.S. – about 150-200 every week. In 1966, there were 600 Catholic seminaries in America. 189 remain. 1000 Southern Baptist congregations close every year with half of them predicted to close by 2030.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Rev. Matt Syrdal about his theological journey and his quest to re-wild Christianity. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls, and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world of which they are a part.

We’re in the middle a major identity crisis in our country – and a lot of it has to do with our collective failure to remember (or in some cases outright deny) that most of our founders were highly suspicious of religion. As you read this, theologically conservative Christians are escalating their efforts to revise history and take concerted action in consolidating their political power and reinforcing their prejudices with the force of law.

For many progressive Christians, our ability to remain in the communities we love is dependent upon our willingness to translate what we hear, sing, and say on Sunday morning. Much of the “content” of a weekly service continues to use the language of traditional Christianity and privilege the very rituals and artifacts which progressives no longer accept literally.

Let me begin by restating my belief that a corporate liturgical text (be it a eucharistic prayer, a collect, or a hymn) needs to be a Wisdom text. This means it is a prayer with the capacity to foster the soul’s growth, helping her to realize that she is an utterly unique expression of Being that is present as Boundless Love.

I have chosen Matthew 21: 12-17 text about Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers” because I notice America is angry. And, with this anger I’ve noticed we have lost the ability and desire to “ agree to disagree,” to talk across our differences; thus, consequently, civil discourse has devolved. For so many, this story of Jesus turning the tables of the money changers becomes a non-apology for getting angry, for posting biting commentaries, and for online rants on divisive political issues, theological controversies and discussions on some polarizing social and cultural issues.

The movement to rewild the environment emerged and evolved out of the conservation movement of the 1960s, and directly challenges conventional conservation methods. While ecological rewilding practices differ from region to region, they share a common goal and means: they seek to increase biodiversity and reduce negative human impacts within an ecosystem by restoring the keystone species of the area – large carnivorous or herbivorous animals that greatly influence how the ecosystem functions as a whole.

What we perceive as this seismic collapse of Christendom, our fractured institutional ways of self-organizing in Western culture — and perhaps even ecological disaster — is in some ways a necessary part of the comprehensive change of consciousness that is upon us. Many mainline church Pastors that I have spoken with or coached have experienced burn-out and disillusionment — an ominous foreboding, that like Lewis and Clark, we don’t have the necessary equipment for this next stage of the journey.

This is simply about the church (remember, the people are the church) breaking out of its safe routines and dogma, and deeply and lovingly engaging the community it is in.

When I first called myself a Christian I was in 7th grade. On my first visit to a small church I accepted Christ as my savior. I’m sure I had no idea what that meant, but it felt like the right thing to do in my 13 year old mind and heart. I spent the rest of middle school and high school so devoted to Jesus that I was at church almost as often as I was at school. I went to learn how to trust my new savior. I went to learn how to surrender successfully. I went to relinquish all sin, back sliding, laziness – parts of the genuine human experience I wanted to lay at the foot of the cross, walk away, and never have to pick them up again.

A Wisdom text has the capacity to foster the soul’s growth or unfolding, helping her to realize that she is an utterly unique expression of Being that is present as boundless love.

  As we enter a new year amidst the dire warnings from the United Nations and even Trump’s own administration about the peril humans and the rest of the Earth are in due to climate change, it seems fitting to ask: Where are there some resources for hope?  Without hope people die.  Without hope people […]

It is by first passing through and celebrating our sense of awe, wonder, gratitude and joy that we are able to enter into darkness and the mystery of The Void. This is what carries us through the other side into a new season of creation and reinvention. This is the lantern that we bring with us into the cave, that burning ember — or promise of the birth of the Christ child within — that gives us hope.

In my last column, “Terrifying and Terrible Texts: Knowing the Difference between Study and Liturgy,” I offered a basic and broad and personal vision of liturgy as “essentially a spiritual practice wherein we gather together to experience becoming embodiments of Being in the present moment.” We gather as unique personal jewels of Life. This vision begins my response to Bishop Spong’s query in Unbelievable: can Christian liturgies be made to reflect “reality rather than nostalgia.” Let me now develop this further in three ways: liturgy as personal spiritual practice of the individual; a reformed liturgical church year; and examples of eucharistic prayers (personal practice in a communal context) informed by this new vision of liturgy. This column will focus on liturgy as personal spiritual practice of the individual, which is the foundation for the subsequent essay on church year and eucharistic prayers.

At the beginning of November, I dizzied myself in a dervish with 7500 participants at the Parliament of World Religions. In a series of keynote presentations spanning Peace & Reconciliation, Climate, Women, Indigenous Voices, and the Next Generation, one unifying message was consistently offered, “Humans have caused this.” Whatever the challenge before us, it is our species who has created the conditions for our current reality.

Christmas is upon us. What is Christmas? How are progressive Christians to understand it? Can we even celebrate it at all?

At this time of year, we turn toward traditions that go deep into the backstories of our lives. The Christmas narrative serves as a foundation for our own narratives, those of our families of origin and those of the families we have created for ourselves. They are good. They are bad. They are beautiful. They are ugly. And we feel compelled to participate whether the stories are healthy or horrible. It’s what we do, right?

David Felten: You’ve talked about how hard it is for people to grasp what is meant when we’re talking about atheism or non-theism. There’s another word that a lot of people aren’t completely happy with but it’s the one we’ve kind of been shackled with. Is there a word other than “progressive” we can use – another approach?

The following is taken from an interview with Bishop John Shelby Spong on September 18th, 2018. Recorded at his home in Richmond, Virginia

The following is taken from an interview with Bishop John Shelby Spong on September 18th, 2018. Recorded at his home in Richmond, Virginia, it has been edited for length and thematic focus.

Interpreting scripture as the “ ord of God” is always subjective and suspect in intent, whether it is being done in the ivy towers of seminaries or within the holy walls of sanctuaries. Interpreting scripture with menacing messages – and with litanies of dos and don’ts – is not about embracing and empowering all people, but about authority and power over certain groups of people. The authority of scripture does not lie in what God said. It lies in the hands of those in power who determine what God ought to say.

I recently received a couple of emails from Progressing Spirit subscribers who reminded me of a song Bob Dylan wrote in the early sixties. It was the title track song of the album, “These Times, They Are A’Changing”. Most people who have commented on this particular recording believe the title track was designed to support and maybe even influence the social change movement that clearly was happening in the 1960’s. Bob Dylan took a lot of criticism in those days, but fifty years later he was honored with the Noble Prize in literature.  And I would argue, these times are truly “a’changing.”

Naming God is difficult at best, divisive even in its mildest form, and can be thought of as sacrilegious at its worst. I was confronted squarely with this reality as I entered divinity school.

Well, my first day of orientation at Wake made me forget about all of that, as this divine calling I had answered, as this desire deep in the core of my soul to talk about the God that I love and what that God wants for this world, was given parameters.

At the end of his most recent book Unbelievable, Bishop Spong poses a question that should be grappled with by every person of faith in this modern era. Essentially, he asks, “Can Christianity in its theology, liturgy, institutions, and practices evolve to meet the rapidly emerging new textures of reality in the 21st century?” As a Christian pastor and public theologian, I have often grappled with this very question, especially as I have witnessed my own worldview shift dramatically away from a “traditional” Christian perspective towards a new way of seeing and being that could only scarcely be called “Christian” by the standards of the dominant institutions within the religion.

To love oneself truly is also to love others—not only because we are societal animals and need community to serve, laugh, offer criticism, assist, but also because we literally can’t survive without others. And by others I don’t mean just other two-legged ones but the others who are of different species—the plants and the animals, the sun and the moon, the waters and the winged ones and the insects and the planets and the supernovas that burst and spread the elements that render our existence possible, etc. etc. Who is our neighbor? Well, all these beings are.

There is a new paradigm in religious thought — that of the progressive, pluralistic ally of science and lover of truth. It is the path of those committed to a living integration of art, science, philosophy and spirituality.

Quite recently, a dear friend and colleague within a spiritual group in which we both participate raised a question, a heartfelt concern, about a book we were asked to read. This particular text, written in the middle of the last century, is a psychotherapy book that explores an energetic understanding of how the mind and body are interconnected. The book has much to commend it. However, my friend was in pain over the blatant homophobia in this piece and was wondering how I and others were experiencing the text and whether it was even appropriate for our study.

Of the 12 theses Bishop Spong examines in his (maybe) last book, Unbelievable, Thesis 11 is, “Life After Death.” Still believable, he asks?

Humans frequently feel a sense of being less than – less than whole, less than healed, less than okay, less than worthy, less than spiritual, less than “connected,” less than Divine. This felt sense of less than, this sense of a gap between an ideal state and present reality, is what humans need to have tended to. We need to have it addressed. We yearn to know that we aren’t defined by our worst days, our worst actions, or our past. We yearn for a sense of “oneness” – and that we are sufficiently in a state of goodness, serenity, or contentment. We yearn to know that we belong in the universe and that the we are welcome to be here. We yearn to love and be loved. We yearn to know we are lovable and to feel that we belong on the planet.

It was a delight to be at Chautauqua Institution in June to hear Bishop John Shelby Spong (Jack) explore the theses presented in his latest and last, last book Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. Over the course of four days, he shared his perspectives on Christianity in a style that is exquisitely his own. Taking questions from dedicated “Women” and “Men” microphones, the integrity with which he approaches his work and those intent on wrestling with it was, as always, apparent. He would not let his audience off the hook. He would not allow them to be content with the easy, well-trod paths up the mountain. His cajoling impatience is his invitation to us to raise our own rallying cry, even if we don’t quite know what to rally around yet. He is content to shake the bejeezus out of our preconceptions and then get out of the way so that we might find our own path.

Jesus’ life was not an expression of a judging, vengeful vision, but was about manifesting a way of life that wasn’t driven by mere survival. Jesus’ life was grounded in a commitment to freeing people to love beyond their boundaries and their fears – beyond tribe, race, ethnicity, gender. This is the kind of love that enabled him to give his life away.

Moral leadership has never been consistent in my lifetime, and I presume for us all. Like most social issues that are shaped by our human actions or inactions, moral leadership has its ebbs and flows.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that reports of bonafide miracles seem to have gone the way of dinosaurs about the time cameras came along – maybe doubly true since video cameras were invented. (Of course, during the early days of Photoshop we did see a bit of a revival.)

If Apostle Paul were alive today I know he would be apoplectic with rage by how Sessions used his sacred text. Apostle Paul was about building a beloved community, evident in his writing in Ephesians 2: 15, 19-22.

Radical inclusion must not be intellectualized but instead connected deeply with our need for personal healing which requires us to heal our “isms.”

Part of the struggle for 21st Christians is that we have inherited a tradition formed many lifetimes ago, a key component being the virgin birth of the Christ. This tradition has been handed to us with little to no permission to rework the interpretations for ourselves. I am eager to follow Bishop Spong’s lead in doing so before more time passes by.

Recently I underwent, along with about 225 other people, a very moving and powerful encounter in Deep Ecumenism or Interfaith in a synagogue in Ashland, Oregon.  We gathered Friday night with an opening Native American chant written by Chief Arvod Looking Horse and a simple Shabbath ceremony including the lighting of candles followed by my talk on Deep Ecumenism and Deep Ecology.

Why are we here? How did we come to be? What is our relationship to the force that created us? What is our relationship to the environment and to the other creatures on Earth? Does man exercise free will? Why is life full of suffering? Where is the line between right and wrong, guilt and innocence, damnation and salvation? For Jews and Christians, these questions (and more) are first posed in that short, simple story.

The Gospel of Thomas reminds us, When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the Living Father. Sooner or later, if we are to realize our Christhood, we must come to know ourselves. No one else can do the knowing for us. But – what a tremendous grace it is when we don’t have to ceaselessly contend with supposed faith communities about the sacred fruit we are, nor fear that they desire to prune away our life.

The June sun was shining, but the whipping wind had us under hats and hoods, huddled close to hear the Naturalist’s instructions, “These flowers just poked out of snow last week.  Up here, Summer turns to Fall by mid-August.  Tundra takes hundreds of years to grow and one sloppily-placed hiking boot can destroy it all.” Then, he pointed across the Alpine carpet, to a collection of immense boulders and we began – adults, grandparents, and children (I was one of those) – hopping rock to rock.  A few paused, using their telephoto lenses to capture the blooms mere centimeters wide; the athletic made it into a game of how quickly they could “gazelle” from one rock to the next; and others moved with deference to the altitude, reaching for each inhale of thin air.  Other species – marmots, elk, birds – might have been looking on quizzically, but we did all we could to not touch our feet to the strong, fragile life below.

A growing number of people who identify as progressive Christians also identify as being post-Christian, and/or post-Church, or even post-God. While this is of course perfectly okay and welcome, I experience this as less than ideal or optimal. To my mind following the way, teaching, and example of Jesus cannot truly, or at least not easily, be done without also having, nurturing, and tending to an active personal spiritual life communing with God (being present to Source/Presence) as well as an active communal/collective shared spiritual community. While some people may say that forums such as this newsletter and other online resources “meet that need” in their lives, words on a page pale in comparison to actually engaging in centering prayer, meditation, communion, shared singing, potluck suppers, organized community service, and experiencing big loving hugs from gifted kindred spirits.

And so, as you know, I eschew the language of traditional Christianity (and liberal, and progressive) and work, instead, to model and inspire others with how it is we might live, loving and celebrating life in its many guises and wrestling with the innumerable challenges that doing so presents. All the while, I remain confident that while it may be the least popular way, it remains the only way to reduce Christianity to its most essential truth – that we must love one another – and tell that story to a new and very precarious world.

What follows is the second part of an interview with the Rev. John Shuck. In this installment, Shuck offers perspectives on the risks of being honest in the “corporate church” and the struggle in dealing with other people’s worldviews when coping with personal tragedy.

The following is taken from an interview with the Rev. John Shuck on April 3, 2018. Recorded in an out-of-the-way corner at Portland’s famed Powell’s Books, it has been edited for length and thematic focus.

A few weeks ago, I recommended to our Progressing Spirit writers that we should all write articles that responded to Bishop Spong’s book, Unbelievable. Then it hit me. I was going to be doing the article this week and as I had suggested to our writers, I would have to start with Spong’s first thesis. “Holy moly,” what was I thinking? For Spong’s first thesis is “God.” Now, I am a student of the Bible. I have been studying it for over forty years. Nearly thirty years ago I came to the dramatic conclusion that the vast majority, if not the entire Bible, was written as metaphor by people who may have been very bright for their time in history but were largely ignorant of the world that inherited this book. We really do not understand the world they lived in, and obviously, they did not understand the world we live in today. Many of their sincere beliefs would be considered, at best, superstitions today. That is one of the reasons it has always amazed me people can argue for an inerrant interpretation of the Bible, using the Bible to “prove” their own interpretation.

Most conservative and mainline churches don’t like to talk about it a lot, but the reality is that churches have done lots of damage to lots of lives for a long time. The list of damages is long. Frankly, that’s probably true for most institutions in general. It’s hard to gain a large footprint and not manage to step on people as you attempt to move forward. It’s hard, but it’s not really excusable and there is always room for improvement.

I would like to take a moment to explore the Gospel of Luke. When I read Biblical passages these days, I am looking for the deeper meaning behind the words. Meaning, I am not just looking for the dates, context, and scribes, though these are important pieces to the puzzle. I am looking for what the crisis might have been that caused the author to write it and how does the scripture speak to that crisis. I am seeking the wisdom that the passages hold for me in the moment as I read them. The wisdom found in sacred texts can shift as the reader shifts…that is one of the reasons why they are still valuable to modern seekers.

As Moses climbs the mountain, he arrives at his soul’s summit out of breath, bone-weary, and hungry; hungry to know the truth of what it is he searches for. He is an embodiment of humanity’s search for the truth of its Being.

Surely this is a new religion isn’t it? Offering a new take on Jesus’ words? How amazing that so-called Evangelical “Christians” seem eager to follow what so blatantly contradicts Jesus’ teachings. It is curious that the new Koch Republican Party continues to court the Evangelical vote successfully since Buchanan and many of the thinkers in this cult were in fact atheists “who looked down on those who believe in God.”

It’s clear that the mind of a child can comprehend the interconnected nature of man’s place in the world in its most simplistic form. When do we lose that awareness? What are we taught or told along the way to make us numb to or forgetful of the image of ourselves as not only part of our environment, but as protectors of it? What role models do we have that ensure we become the kind of person who will “watch out” for others bent on destroying or exploiting the Earth?

Historian Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is scarier than a Stephen King novel or a movie such as “The Exorcist.”  Yet the former is non-fiction through and through!  The author declares she is offering up “the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”

I offer this sharing in the wake of the tragic mass shooting at a high school in Florida – a shooting that took place on Ash Wednesday. Knowing that the vast majority of my fellow Americans are not progressive Christians, nor have the majority even heard of progressive Christianity. So, I sometimes write with that larger audience in mind – seeking to appeal to their basic Christian understandings – even if that means employing or coming across as assuming a certain amount of conventional Christian rhetoric or perspectives -and then working from that place to help people shift to a more progressive understanding. It’s important to meet people where they are. With this caveat in mind, let those who have ears to hear, hear.

While Trump’s comment will now make it more difficult for immigrants from “shithole” countries to enter the U.S., the challenge, however, will be particularly arduous for its LGBTQ asylum seekers. These people flee their countries to avoid criminalization, torture, violence, public persecution, political scapegoating and moral cleansing.

Rejecting or reinterpreting traditional religious beliefs has always undermined family relationships, communities of faith, and the general coherence of the public. Many who haven’t crossed the threshold of a religious building in decades (if ever) hold rigidly to the privileges they believe religion provides them. Toy with those beliefs and you are unwittingly challenging the rights of the privileged, rights they too frequently enjoy denying those who do not share their beliefs. And those who do participate in religious communities with regularity are often invested in language and ritual they believe is integral to their experience. “Without reciting the Lord’s Prayer when we gather, how will we remember who we are?” they worry.

Bishop Spong calls for change. He challenges us to begin to rebuild a new Christianity and frankly, that is what we are trying to do here. These are the issues we have asked our authors to deal with. We do not need to do any more deconstruction. It has been done, and done well.

Language is more important than many of us realize. More precisely, the specific words we choose to use impact our way of thinking, our social behavior, and many other perspectives of our lives. It’s actually a fairly recent development in the human brain in terms of our long history as a species. The frontal lobes of our brains have actually expanded to handle its expanded work requirements.

January is over and 2018 is finding its voice. Each year extends possibility. Within the possibility, events take place – births, deaths, celebrations, mishaps – and history is made. Meister Eckhart, the 12th century mystic proclaimed,
We are all meant to be mothers of God…for God is always needing to be born.

What is happening in the human soul when someone, such as the President of the United Sates, refers to the predominately black countries of Africa and that of Haiti with dehumanizing racist rhetoric? What is happening in the human soul when political leaders seek simplistic solutions to cultural shifts in the erection of walls? What is happening in the human soul when the U.S. President fails to condemn neo-Nazi violent demonstrations?

I’m often inspired by the spiritual practices and traditions of faiths other than my own. Many of them come in handy as suggestions I can make to members of my congregation. With the exasperation many are feeling over our current political reality, I’ve had my mind on practices that could potentially help people push back the darkness and ground themselves in simple, life-affirming actions.

“Unbelievable” began its life years ago when my daughter, Jaquelin, who owns a Ph.D. degree in physics from Stanford University said to me: “Dad, the questions the church keeps trying to answer we don’t even ask anymore!” She was not hostile. It was just a matter of fact statement. The church keeps posing issues that the secular world has settled, or at least has decided to ignore. Questions such as: Who or what is God? What does original sin mean? What does it mean to say that Jesus died for my sins? Can one really believe in life after death? What does it mean to be born again? Why do we not try to grow up?

The book has elements about it that have bordered on the miraculous. I was not sure I would ever be able to complete it. I had written about ninety per cent of this volume before I had a stroke in September of 2016. The stroke immobilized my right side. It was not clear that I would recover. I could not lift my right hand, nor walk without a walker, dragging my right leg. These symptoms, however, began to fade in about six weeks and all my limbs have returned to functioning, a bit weaker, but functioning nonetheless. My tread mill was a valuable aid. I had used it daily for many years, but now it became important in my rehabilitation. My rule was to use the track for one hour a day. Once I did twelve minute miles or five miles an hour. Today in that hour I do three and one quarter miles, not a jogger’s pace, but steady as strength has flowed back into my body. One symptom, however, has remained resistant to my efforts at recovery. I cannot make my right hand write legibly enough that I can read it. I could use the computer, but that is not natural to me. I never learned to type and hunting and pecking takes so much time. People suggested that I get a program where I talk into my computer and it converts the words to print. I tried that, but perhaps I was undone by my southern accent. Every time I spoke the word “career” the computer would write “Korea!”

In dark times like ours one takes delight in those who are still committed to a search for truth and are still busy hunting gathering for what matters. We are blessed still with such figures in our midst and I want to celebrate two in this essay. One, a citizen of Toronto and of Canada, Naomi Klein, described herself by phone one day to me as “Jewish, Feminist and Atheist.” She is a profound author, social activist and filmmaker. The other, Scott Russell Sanders, celebrates his small town existence in Methodist rooted rural Ohio and on this planet and in this universe in a number of wonderful books. The former’s two recent books, Capitalism vs. The Climate and No Is Not Enough, are as on target to our troubled times as any I know; and Sanders book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, complements Klein’s in a profoundly mystical way.

for Poetry 

To better help people understand the difference between liberal Christianity and progressive Christianity, I’ve referred to what I call the “The 11 Ps of Progressive Christianity“: 
* Postmodern * Passionate * Poetic * Prophetic/Political * Prayerful * Practical/Practice/Praxis/orthoPraxy * Paradoxical * Pro-LGBTQI * Peaceful/Pacifist * Panentheistic * Pluralistic. It is the third of those three that I intend to convey at this time. Over the years I’ve put forth the following assertions:

The holiday season is a difficult time of year for many.

Too often we see the glitz and glamour that this holiday brings, and we miss its spiritual message. The underlying message in celebrating the season-Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and the winter solstice- is the full embrace of human difference and diversity.

I believe if Americans stayed more focused on the message and teachings of this holiday season, many LGBTQ youth and young adults would not have the annual angst of searching for a home for the holidays.

However, LGBTQ people like the Early Christians struggle for full acceptance in society.

So here we are, well into Advent, and well into the annual grating of teeth that takes place whenever we are exposed to saccharine Christmas music purring or prancing from over-decorated storefronts and selling everything from the tiniest stocking stuffer to cars. And here we are, back to those lectionary passages that bond themselves to church doctrine that gives many a church leader hives. Or indigestion. The stress of the “high holy days” seeps in. Cue the reverential organ while we light the candles on the Advent wreath – Hope. Peace. Joy. Love. Blocking the commercial clatter from our Sunday morning services, we reverently steer our congregations toward the well-worn path that leads past the overbooked inn to a lowly stable and the nativity of our Lord.

Well here we go again, friends, facing another Christmas. The big stores are posting huge advertisements, notifying us of major sales, playing Christmas music and of course wherever you go there is a Santa Clause. It has been that way for a couple of weeks. It seems to me that this phenomenon starts earlier every year. I cannot help but wonder what Jesus would say if he returned today and observed the way we celebrate his so-called birthday. He was born poor, was always poor, and spoke primarily to the poor.

The warmth of the house on Thanksgiving day; the comforting aromas of a home-cooked meal; the thankfulness that felt like it filled the air as family gathered, embraced, and shared stories from the past year; all of it was a reflection of my mother to me. It was a celebration of comfort, abundance, gratitude, and love. It was a celebration of family. And mom was the linchpin of the family for us.

Secretly, Thanksgiving was probably my favorite holiday back then. Yes, even more than Christmas. I loved Thanksgiving!

The first lines of John’s gospel proclaim that “in the beginning was the Word,” and that “all things came into being through the Word.”

We can hear these words literally as an historical assertion claiming that at some distant point in ancient times – the initiation of time – the Word (whatever that might mean) came into being as a kind of medium through which all else that has come to be was created. My sense is that misses the poetic thrust of this mystical writer. Rather, I understand John to have experienced that not only in the beginning of each and every experience we have, but in the middle and culmination as well, there is this mystery he identifies as “the Word.”

What follows in interview form is the final installment of three columns inspired by a presentation Michael Morwood offered at the Common Dreams Conference in Brisbane, Queensland, in 2016. In this final segment, Morwood offers a new perspective on worship and prayer – along with some concluding thoughts on religion in general and recommendations on a way forward.

Last night I returned from a conference in Jamaica about Men and Masculinity—they are dealing with a veritable epidemic of violence among young men and killings of men by men. Not unlike El Salvador and many other places around the globe.

Here at home we have our own violence, much of it also spawned by reptilian brain action/reaction responses, efforts of striving to be “number one” at all costs, buttressed by sins of greed and denial and of patriarchy gone berserk.

If you have a Facebook account you are no doubt abundantly aware by now of the “Me too” campaign that has been taking place. It’s a powerful way for women to convey to the world that they have been the victim of sexual harassment or sexual assault at the hands of men. It is quite clear that nearly all women have experienced either of those – some on a daily basis. They’re trying to show us the great extent of this problem by simply posting “Me too.” My initial response was simply this: “I believe you and it’s not OK.”

Here is a short story. The theme: how human-centeredness alienated us from primary reality (Gᴏᴅ) and how ecology — the interdisciplinary study of the way, the truth, and the life of the living biosphere — can lead us home.

We’ve been anticipating the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation for some time. Now that the month is upon us, it seems more like a private birthday party than something worthy of global attention. In truth, I suppose it is. With the global number of Reform Tradition Protestants diminishing, the celebration of the dramatic and cataclysmic leave-taking that was our birth seems of little interest to any but those enchanted by the history of such things and the few others taking advantage of the liturgical and party possibilities offered up by the date.

I have been wondering lately, if we are really missing the conscience of our mainline churches in our country. Most of us are aware of the political, social and personal conflicts that are going on in our country right now. And most of us are aware of the sad numbers of our dying churches. I have been wondering if there is a connection.

In 1966 the cover of TIME magazine asked the jarring question, “Is God Dead?” It was the first time TIME used only text on it’s cover and the impact only added to the striking question.

“Is God Dead?”

Three simple words that for a brief time created quite a stir throughout the United States. Many angry sermons were delivered in rebuttal. Even Bob Dylan got in on the action in a Playboy interview saying, “If you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself.” The National Review even asked the question if perhaps it was TIME that was dead.

What follows in interview form is the second of three columns inspired by a presentation Michael Morwood offered at the Common Dreams Conference in Brisbane, Queensland, in 2016. In this installment, Morwood offers a new perspective on revelation, a re-visioning of who Jesus was, and continues with thoughts on whether our conventional ideas of religion have any real value anymore.

Progressive Christianity intentionally seeks to evolve and adapt with the times so that the faith can continue to be sensible, relevant, and meaningful in the lives of people. As part of this, we tend to believe that Christianity isn’t the “best,” “only,” “right,” and/or “true,” religion or way that God is at work in the world. We honor that the Divine is fully at work in all of the major world religions – and beyond.

Much of the work I have been privileged to do over the past thirteen years has been the result of a conversation I had one day with the late Reverend Jim Adams, founder of The Center for Progressive Christianity (now called ProgressiveChristianity.org). If it weren’t for you, much of this would never have happened at all. Think of it as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” contribution!

This week my brother and sister-in-law are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. I was reminded that I was ordained a priest the year they were married and that indeed I performed their wedding (my very first). So maybe it is time to offer a few reflections on the meaning of priesthood in our time.

As some of you are already aware, I am in the middle of a project retelling early Christian texts as poems, tentatively titled Apocryphal Monologues. Each poem pairs modern-day ethical questions with words from an ancient text, putting them into dialogue with one another. In some cases I am retelling whole texts, such as On the Origin of the World. In others, as in the poem above, I engage with a single episode or saying. Along with miscarriage, the poems so far address nuclear meltdowns, the arms race, rape, abortion, and the feminine as a legitimate expression of the divine. I don’t want the poems to be preachy; I try not to moralize. I’m more interested in asking difficult questions of the texts and demanding emotionally honest answers.

As the President of Progressivechristianity.org, and as an occasional writer for this publication, I receive a lot of email from readers. Most of it is helpful. Some of it I admit is not fun to read. Two weeks ago I received a rather rude note from someone who was clearly not a fan of mine or of progressive Christianity. His email had an attachment. The attachment was an article written for Patheos by a Catholic Priest, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, “Twelve Reasons Why Progressive Christians Will Die Out”. If you look this up you will discover that this article was written and published back in January 2016. I presume that this man’s intention was not to necessarily share an “informative” article with me but was rather to make the point that our organization is fighting an “impossible mission.”

It surprises me just a little bit how frequently I get asked about my very visible participation in politics. The truth is while some might assume that as a minister I probably start my day off with prayer and/or a devotion, I start my day with about an hour of reading through the news and scheduling the stories I find the most important or engaging on various social media outlets. Probably the most notable of those outlets is The Christian Left. As you might imagine the name “The Christian Left” provokes plenty of negative responses, everything from “isn’t that an oxymoron” to “they call the organization that because all the REAL Christians have LEFT it.”

One of the most characteristic features of Rabbi Jesus’ teaching is his experience of the reign of God as present here and now. This manifestation of God’s reign is not a reality to be feared, but as we hear in the synoptic gospels, is to be received as “good news.” But why? What are some of the qualities of the reign of God that tell of its goodness in our lives? And what does it even mean to speak of “God’s reign” in the 21st century within a culture in which kingdoms and monarchs do not exist, and resonate within our imagination and lives as antiquated and oppressive?

Most 21st century Christians have grown up indoctrinated by a conventional religious experience that offers the assurance of having all the answers tied up in a little bow, just for the believing. Many still find this to be comforting, but a growing number are antsy. On the verge of becoming what Bishop Spong calls “church alumni/ae,” they know too much. Archaeology, astrophysics, and any number of other scientific disciplines continue to make discoveries that compel us to re-evaluate our true place in the universe – and we are right to be feeling increasingly humble.

Speaking of a need for a Reformation makes me question whether the time has arrived for a new religious order that is in fact not tied to a particular religion but is a Spiritual Order, one that might help people of various religious faiths and none to gather around a common value and focus. I think our times call for a focus on the sacredness of the Earth and all her creatures. Therefore I propose a new order called “The Order of the Sacred Earth.” Its members may come from any and all life-styles, married, single, celibate, gay, straight and from any and all occupations so long as their work mirrored the values of honoring and supporting the Earth and her creatures. Blue collar and white collar workers would be welcomed. People of all religious traditions and none would be welcome.

Most of my attempts to connect and relate to God – involve silence.

And most frequently, not much more than that.

I sometimes wonder if there’s really much difference between seeking to connect to God – and not seeking to. Similar experience and results.

It’s been four years since I decided to publicly identify as an atheist. After the manner of time’s calming influence upon things about which we were once so passionate, my perspective on the wisdom of the decision has altered. And as we so often do, I revisit that decision from time to time and wonder if, given the opportunity to relive those days, I would make it again.

June is planting season in Idaho. One can drive along rural highways past fields of corn shoots followed by the satisfyingly dark green foliage of mounded potato starts, fresh mint, and sugar beets. Small-scale and industrial farmers alike rush against the short growing season of the high desert to get plants into the ground after the last frost but before the July heat can kill the tender seedlings. This is the time of year I can’t help but recall Wendell Berry’s wonderful poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Now, I could have long conversations with Berry about some of his less appealing notions, but this poem speaks in a wonderfully anti-imperial, Christian voice that I can embrace. Here is how it begins, in an ironic tone:

About ten years ago, I attended a two day conference that garnered a lot of anticipation and excitement about the topics, which were: a new way of communicating our religious beliefs and the discussion of postmodern theology. Near the end of the conference, I was ready for it to be over. It had been a good conference. The keynote speakers were well respected and leaders in their fields. But I was done.

From “extreme monotheism” to “homoousion” to “partialism” to “modalism,” Christianity has a wide and wild variety of understandings of the theory of the Trinity. Frankly, that reality should not be too surprising. After all, the Trinity is in fact a theory and it is a theory that one must be fairly creative with to fit into all the necessary theological perquisites it comes burdened with. That is not to say it is too convoluted to have meaning, but I certainly don’t bestow upon it the meaning that most mainline theologies would like for it to hold.

Over these past several weeks, I’ve been reflecting anew on what it means to be a wise person. This is due in part because in the congregations I serve, we describe the spiritual journey of Holy Week as “The Wisdom Way of Christ,” exploring the stories and experiencing the reformed liturgies as a holy path for 21st century seekers. As human beings, we long for wisdom and it is extolled in poetry, song, and art. But what is wisdom, particularly in the spiritual tradition and how does it differ from what we might describe as the “wisdom of the world”?

Right after Easter in 2015, I arrived at church as a fellow staff member was going out the door saying, “I’m going to get a picture of one of the banners.” “What banners?!” I’d come in the back way to town and hadn’t seen that down the main street of Fountain Hills, eight churches had posted large identical banners overnight: “Progressive” Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”

There is such a thing as “fake news”; and “fake science;” and there is also, we must make clear, such a thing as “fake religion” and certainly of “fake Christianity.” I would maintain that all those persons and institutions political and corporate that are in purposeful denial about climate change are in direct contradiction to everything Jesus taught and tried to teach.

As a progressive Christian pastor and author I frequently receive critical pushback from conservative and fundamentalist Christians who adamantly declare that the only way to experience salvation is by giving intellectual assent to certain specific truth claims about the life of Jesus. Scratch that, they don’t generally care about his life, their focus is primarily upon Jesus’ death and his resurrection. Their message boils down to “Unless you believe that Jesus died for your sins and that he physically rose from the grave, you are a heretic, and will go to hell when you die.”

The calendars we give and receive as Christmas gifts – Sudoku-a-Day desk tear-offs, or expensive, hang-on-the-wall art photography – don’t pay much heed to the Christian calendar aside from noting its two largest festivals – Christmas and Easter – and helping retailers take advantage of a few minor ones – Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s, and Hallowe’en. Denominational church calendars fill in more of the blanks, but we all know that the year we follow starts on the first of January, a bleak and dreary date in the northern hemisphere and a riot of colour and beauty in the southern. I don’t know anyone who hangs up a calendar that starts the first day of Advent and marks their year in the way Christians once did long ago. Of course, I don’t know any monks. Perhaps they do.

After a hard winter for many of us, of deep snows and lost loves, in this holy week commemorating death and resurrection, the cherries and pears and plums are blossoming and our thoughts are opening with them. What are we also becoming? In Chapter 4 of the Dhammapada, “Flowers,” the Buddha is said to have offered this teaching:

Churches are dying at an alarming rate. Every year more than 4000 churches close their doors for good and more than 2,765,000 people leave the church each year.

Yet we, the Church, insist on doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting different results. When confronted with change we tend to insist that “it has always been done that way,” as if history is an acceptable excuse for continuing down our path to demise.

Good morning friends. I am the Board President of ProgressiveChristianity.org and have held that position for over 12 years. Our organization has been the publishers of the Bishop Spong’s newsletters and the owners of the John Shelby Spong website for nearly five years now. The website is titled, A New Christianity for a New World. I hope you all avail yourself to this treasure of fascinating and interesting articles by Bishop Spong that go back almost 20 years. As subscribers you have access to these absolutely wonderful writings of one of the best authors of our time. If you have trouble accessing these nearly two thousand articles by Bishop Spong please contact our office and we will help you. This morning, however, I want to share with you some of the things we are doing with your subscriptions newsletter.

Throughout his poignant and moving book, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”, the Vancouver physician, Gabor Maté, offers heartrending accounts of the existential devastation wrought on the fabric of our personal being by the effects of addiction. One particularly graphic description strikes at the core of the human struggle.

Bishop Spong’s reputation for expressing unapologetic, sometimes blunt, theological opinions is long-established. While some have accused him of being overbearing or egotistical, others have depended on him for a firm defense of a particular spot on the theological spectrum.

I first learned of Bishop Spong’s prophetic work and his work with the Jesus seminar over 34 years ago while I was still a Dominican priest working in the Chicago area. To hear of an Episcopal bishop who was approaching the Scriptures with a critical sense of questioning and scholarship and who was supporting gay rights and women’s rights was, needless to say, a breath of fresh air. When Bishop Spong invited me out to Newark to lead a day retreat with his clergy I was pleased to be invited and I recall my opening line to him when I entered his car at the airport: “We heretics need to stick together,” I said. I don’t recall his demurring in any way. Following my day-long presentation (which included circle dancing and I was pleased to see a Bishop participating in such), Bishop Spong said to me: “Usually people leave at lunch time as they are allowed to do but this day was so exciting everyone stayed until the end.”

Bluntly speaking, American Christianity has jumped the shark.* It has been co-opted, hijacked, and derailed.

There are exceptions, but for the most part, the way of following Jesus in the U.S. has become reduced to an overly personalized, private state of mind that involves individuals giving intellectual assent to certain truth claims – believing X, Y, and Z about Jesus and God – instead of a state of mind and a collective way of being that is about becoming less anxious, more serene, more mindful, and more composed and intentional in our actions and way of being. This American form of Christianity still involves living in fear instead of living in faith.

I know. You think you’ve opened the wrong email or caught a link to the wrong page. This must be from Mind, Body, Green, or A Daily Dose of Motivation. Maybe you’re signed up to Les Brown’s email list and are used to getting motivational encouragement just like this every day.

But this isn’t that. This is what you were looking for. I promise.

Martin Scorsese recently released a film adaptation of the 1966 novel “Silence” by Shusaku Endo that traces the persecution of Christians in 17th-century Japan. As a long-time admirer and friend of the Japanese people, I am understandably nervous about how this new film will affect Western perceptions of a country I hold dear, so I looked into the history of religious persecution in Japan to help put the film in context. Ironically, the best book I found on the subject wasn’t on Christianity at all, but on Buddhism: Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution by James Edward Ketelaar.

It’s interesting, I love reading Spong now for the exact opposite reason I first loved reading Spong.

Let me explain.

I’ve been a devout Christian my entire life. From the somewhat conservative thinking Greystone Baptist Church of my childhood to the progressive thinking Presbyterian Church of the Covenant where I currently serve as Interim minister I have never lost my “soul deep” belief in God.

Even before our children were born, my wife, Rïse, and I, like many a parent, sang and read to our children. Later, nestled between us in bed and then resting upon our laps, they listened intently as we read about rabbits, moons, gardens, fingers, toes and smiles. Bit by bit, these little beings began to imitate us, holding the book precariously in tiny hands; looking first at the pages and next at the words as if reading, and eventually, eagerly, albeit clumsily, turning the book’s leaf. And then one day it happened, as if by magic – they themselves were reading. They had taught themselves to learn how to read. Such pride in their newly discovered competence. And the truly magic sojourn into the land of truth had begun in earnest. They were experiencing the exhilarating freedom of moving beyond the two-dimensional landscape of imitation into the endless world of exploration, made possible by following the Spirit’s invitation to learn how to learn. Imitation is a fine and necessary beginning, but as an ending it is claustrophobic, and stultifying as death.

As you may have heard, while visiting in Marquette, Michigan I suffered a stroke. The date was September 10th. Since that time I have worked hard to regain my strength. I have been quite successful in that and now have no trouble walking or using my arms. It has been a learning experience. Health is a major demand of my life. I still use my running track each day for about three miles, so I feel most fortunate. The book I was writing on “Charting a New Reformation” will meet its deadline and be at Harper by the due date, the first of March, 2017. I entertained returning to my column, but as the time goes by I no longer have the strength to keep up that schedule, so I have informed Fred Plumer of ProgressiveChristianity.org that I will not be able to return to that task. I write to notify you, my readers, and to enable Fred to begin the process to choose a successor.

I return today to a subject that I have covered before. It is essential however, to this series on the sources of anti-Semitism, so I ask my reader’s indulgence while I once again bring Judas into focus. My request to you is a simple one. Suspend for a moment your critical faculties, as well as […]

Evolution shaped our brains to take shortcuts. Our senses relay to the brain a ceaseless, torrential downpour of stimulus and information, and so our neurons team up to sort and sift this stream into higher-order abstractions–mainly categorizations in the form of either/or classifications.

Christians have never been significantly committed to the preservation of our common environment. Ecological concerns are present in Church life, but they never quite make it to the top tier of the issues that consume ecclesiastical energy. That is usually reserved for theological and sexual concerns. To be fair, each denomination probably includes some environmental […]

It’s accurately said that “we stand on the shoulders of giants” and John Shelby Spong is one of mine. Bishop Spong has been a tremendous influence on my life as a pastor who is also a theologian and writer. Though we’re not of the same denomination, we are birds of a feather and kindred spirits. We share similar vocational callings. We give a damn about Christianity and its capacity to serve as a source of healing and prophetic transformation in a world that sorely needs those things. And, we care enough about the lineage we’re part of to critique the hell out of it – literally – to help separate the wheat from the chaff in ways that help the faith to be relevant and meaningful in this new millennium.

Religious people frequently assert that they have received their truth by divine revelation. It is a strange assertion, leading almost inevitably to the power claim that there is a single “true church” or religious system that alone offers salvation. It also produces such irrational doctrines as papal infallibility and scriptural inerrancy. A study of religious […]

Dear Jack,

When I learned of your stroke in September, I was en route to the fourth Common Dreams Conference in Brisbane, Queensland. Having no details at that point and being a half-a-planet away, I was anxious about having to endure the uncertainty of this news on my own. I needn’t have worried, though. As it turns out, I couldn’t have found myself in a more supportive and equally concerned crowd anywhere in the world

“My goal in life is to pray without ceasing”.
Bishop John Shelby Spong

In his book A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith is Being Born, Bishop Spong addresses multiple issues worthy of further consideration especially because the coming year 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and Spong is rightly calling for a Reformation today.(1) I suppose it is worth mentioning that I have been doing the same as in my book A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity which contains the 95 theses that I pounded at Luther’s church in Wittenberg at Pentecost season in 2006 in response to Cardinal Ratzinger making himself pope, a practice I repeated five years later at Cardinal Law’s Basilica of Maria Maggiore in Rome on a Sunday morning in protest of his cover-up for pedophile clergy in his previous assignment as archbishop of Boston.

In President Obama’s recent nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the ninth justice on the Supreme Court, a new reality forced its way into our consciousness. With the resignation of Justices David Souter in 2009 and John Paul Stevens in 2010, the last representatives of Protestant Christianity — by far the largest religious […]

It is time that we as a nation stop pretending and face the facts as they are. The evidence is overwhelming. Despite concentrated efforts to perfume intolerance under code words like “states’ rights,” “voter fraud,” “conservative values” and even “religious freedom,” this country is still caught in a web of ancient prejudices. In our public […]

Attila the None – The headlines are pretty clear. Both Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute have told us that people, especially young people, aren’t so much avoiding church as not even thinking it is relevant. In this American election year, those who identify as the Nones – people who state on census forms that they have no religious affiliation – have been declared the largest “religious” voting bloc in the country. Those seated in the pews of mainline, Protestant America can no longer assume they have the strong political voice they once did.

I need to speak candidly with you about hospitality, perhaps the most iconic of Christian values and one of the easiest to go on attributing to the historical Jesus in spite of how much else has been stripped away from his biography. We need to discuss this because of the scary things people have been saying about refugees, about Black men, about what can be done to women. Because of the people who are bleeding in the streets.

I am really not comfortable writing this article. There is a sense I am writing an obituary and nothing could be further from the truth. Bishop Spong is a beloved friend and he is apparently doing well in his recovery. I suppose I am a little nervous knowing that he will be reading what I write and we already have a history about this. For those who do not know, I am the President of ProgressiveChristianity.org. and we have been publishing Bishop Spong’s weekly articles for over six years now. About a two years ago I had dropped him a line indicating that his contract was running out and wondered what his plans were. Be assured, I wanted him to extend the contract but we needed to know. I do not remember exactly what I wrote but I may have written something like, “Jack, I know you are approaching your 85th birthday, but thought we should get this cleared up.”

Responding to Bishop Spong’s 12 Principles and the Future of Religion
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 6 October 2016 18 Comments
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Dear Faithful Readers: Bishop Spong is now home in New Jersey and continues to recuperate from his stroke. Until he is back to his writing we will continue to publish Weekly Essays, some from his treasure trove of past essays and some from guest authors. This week we are pleased to offer you this article from the Rev. Matthew Fox. Responding to Bishop Spong’s 12 Principles and the Future of Religion

It was in the Amazon rain forest that I first discovered just how deeply survival dominates every living thing. Sunlight and water are the prizes which guarantee the survival of plant life. So in that rain forest I saw vines that would snake across the forest floor until they came to the darkest part of […]

“The traditional understanding of life after death in Western Christianity was created on the premise of human uniqueness. Human beings were understood to be a special creation, made in the image of God, and endowed with an eternal soul. That perspective has not only been challenged, but destroyed by modern scholarship. Charles Darwin showed us […]

Before prayer can be made real our understanding of God, coupled with our understanding of how the world works, must be newly defined. Before prayer can have meaning, it must be built on an honest sharing of life. Cornelia, the woman about whom I wrote last week, did that for me. Before prayer can be […]

Prayer does not bring a theistic God to our aid. It does not protect us from danger, sickness or death. Life confronts us with the truth of that reality time after time. What then is prayer? Is it anything more than pious smoke and mirrors? I think it is, but before I could see that […]

“Prayer, understood as a request made to an external, theistic deity, to act in human history, is little more than an hysterical attempt to turn the holy into the service of the human. Most of our prayer definitions arise out of the past and are thus dependent on an understanding of God that no longer […]

One of my favorite phrases, “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” comes from the poet, James Russell Lowell. No words capture for me quite so well the plight of ancient codes of law like the Ten Commandments. We still, however, have to make decisions in a complex world. How are we to do that? In this […]

Let me review the path we have walked thus far. We have exploded the myth found in the idea that the Ten Commandments or any other ancient code of law has been, or was dictated by God. This insight also proclaims that our laws always arise out of the common experience of the people. We […]

He was seated in the VIP box at the Democratic National Convention, held during the last week of July, 2016, in Philadelphia. He was surrounded in that reserved and exclusive seating area by the power-elite of the Democratic Party: A former President, the sitting Vice-President and the “second lady,” the spouses and children of the […]

We have thus far relativized the mythical claims made for the code by which the people of Israel claimed to live, by noting that even the Bible reveals confusion about the source of the Ten Commandments. These laws clearly grew out of the common life of the people over a long period of time. They […]

One of the ways the demise of yesterday’s religious power can be determined is to notice that things, once held to be ultimately sacred, now appear in jokes that cause people not only to laugh, but also to deal with the loss of the security of yesterday’s religious symbols at the same time. When James […]

He changed the conscience of the entire world, yet he never held a public office. Even Nelson Mandela, perhaps the only other 20th century figure to move the world as deeply as Elie Wiesel did, finally achieved political power and served as the president of his nation, newly born out of intense racial strife. Wiesel […]

“The ability to define and separate good from evil can no longer be achieved with appeals to ancient codes like the Ten Commandments or even to later interpretations of the Ten Commandments like the Sermon on the Mount. Contemporary moral standards must be hammered out in the arena in which life-affirming moral principles are forced […]

The gospels of Mark and Matthew were composed while the Christian movement was still part of the synagogue. The gospel of Luke may well have been written after the fracture that caused the Christians to be expelled from the synagogue, but because Luke based his gospel largely on the gospel of Mark, his work still […]

“The Biblical story of Jesus’ ascension assumes a three-tiered universe, which was dismissed in intellectual circles some 500 years ago. If Jesus’ ascension must be regarded as a literal event that occurred in history, it is now beyond the capacity of our 21st century minds to accept it or believe it.”   The late Carl […]

They gathered at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Chicago, some 500 delegates strong. They came from all across the United States and abroad with the Netherlands, in particular, being well represented. By and large they were a well-educated group made up largely of professional people: doctors, lawyers, business leaders and academics. Their single most […]

It had the nature of a tribal gathering, or perhaps of “old-timers day” at Yankee Stadium. People came from across the nation and throughout the Diocese of Newark, which encompasses the Jersey suburbs of New York City, stretching from the Hudson River to the Delaware Water Gap. Clergy and people, who served so many years […]

Paul was the first, perhaps he was also the most important, but he was not the only witness to the resurrection of Jesus in the biblical narrative. To complete our story and to validate anew a different concept of resurrection, we turn briefly to the other narratives. Be warned, surprises await us even there. Mark, […]

Last week, we explored the Pauline corpus of the New Testament in order to learn what Paul meant when he wrote that “God raised Jesus” to the “right hand of God.” This was the concept for which Paul used the word “resurrection.” It is quite a different concept from what this word has come to […]

“The Easter event gave birth to the Christian Movement and continues to transform it. That does not mean, however, that Easter was the resuscitation of Jesus’ deceased body back into human history. The earliest biblical records state that “God raised him.” The reality of the experience of resurrection must be separated from its later mythological […]

Everywhere one looks in the Christian religion, one discovers the mentality of “Atonement Theology.” In the church a fetish has developed about the “cleansing power of the blood of Jesus” and its inherent ability to wash away our sins. Protestants apparently want to bathe in the blood of Christ so they sing hymns about fountains […]

“Atonement Theology, especially in its most bizarre form, which we call ‘substitutionary atonement,’ presents us with a God who is barbaric, a Jesus who is a victim and fills human beings with little more than life–destroying guilt. The phrase, ‘Jesus died for my sins,’ is thus not just dangerous, it is also theologically absurd.” We […]

The nature miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospel tradition were not supernatural events that marked his life as divine. They were rather Moses stories interpretively wrapped around Jesus to proclaim that the God who was present in Moses was even more powerfully present in Jesus, the messiah. The stories in the synoptic gospels (Mark, […]

“In a post-Newtonian world supernatural invasions of the natural order performed by either the eternal God or the “Incarnate Jesus” are simply not a viable explanation of what actually happened.” We have noted earlier that originally miracles did not appear to have been connected with the memory of Jesus. The first book to portray Jesus […]

Following the Exodus, Moses’ miraculous power was never again so powerfully displayed in the biblical story, but it did not disappear. In a battle against the Amalekites (Exod. 17:8-14) when Moses held his hands up, the Hebrew army won the day, but when fatigue forced him to lower his arms, his enemies prevailed. This problem […]

“The Miracles Stories of the Old Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an Incarnate Deity.” I wonder how many of my readers are aware of the fact that miracles do not enter the Jesus tradition until the 8th decade. Paul, who wrote between the years 51 […]

In all probability Jesus was born in Nazareth. That is surely the assumption made in Mark, the first gospel to be written. The names of both of his parents do not appear to be historically known. The name Mary is first mentioned only in the eighth decade in Mark. All of the biographical details of […]

Almost all of us, at one time or another, have participated in a Christmas pageant. We have been angels or shepherds, wise men or Joseph, the Virgin Mary or even one of the animals located around the stable – a camel, a sheep, a lamb or a cow. At one point early in my ministry, […]

It was Charles Darwin, who was the primary voice sounding the death knell on Atonement theology. Darwin’s work did not just attack the literal details of the Bible’s creation story. That was but his first perceived target. By the clever scheme of suggesting that each of the seven days in the creation story might well […]

The perfection of God’s world was described again and again in the text of this Genesis story. We read in Genesis 2 that the world was a fertile garden, but it lay fallow without a person to till it. To overcome this problem, Adam was created. Then we are told that “every tree that was […]

In the fourth century of this Common Era, when the creeds of the Christian Church were being formed, people reading the Christian Bible assumed that it was “the inerrant word of God.” They were certain that God was the author and that the Bible could not, therefore, be wrong. They also had no sense of […]

It has been a very unconventional political primary season. In the last three weeks two public debates sank to what seem to me to be new lows in presidential politics. In the first of these debates three of the candidates called other candidates for the same office “liars” on fifty-two occasions in that single debate. […]

“The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings have fallen into “original sin” is pre-Darwinian mythology and pre-Darwinian non-sense.” If one were to look at recent Christian history, one would discover that most of the ecclesiastical energy over the past 150 years has been employed against two perceived major enemies. The […]

“If God can no longer be thought of in theistic terms, then conceiving of Jesus as ‘the incarnation of the theistic deity’ has also become a bankrupt concept.” Some years ago in conversation with the Dean of a theological seminary, he made what he surely thought was a safe assertion: “I base my faith on […]

It was an historical illusion anyway, a cherished and romantic notion practiced in all kinds of theoretical venues. The idea that the lands that once constituted the British Empire would all have a single faith tradition was always little more than a lovely bit of pious propaganda. History has recorded the fact that wherever the […]

The Book has Arrived! It has happened in my life twenty-five times before. It seems that one might get used to it after a while. That is not, however, how the emotional patterns work in the life of an author. The moment of the book’s birth is always accompanied by anxiety; sometimes even reaching the […]

Today, I conclude the discussion of the first of my twelve theses posted on the internet in my hope to “Chart a New Reformation.” I began with the crucial task of reimagining God, which is foundational in all religious thinking. I have struggled to be careful with the way I use words. I have sought […]

It was a 6th century Greek philosopher named Xenophanes who wrote: “If horses had gods, they would look like horses.” Xenophanes was pointing to the reality, which all of us face when we try to speak of or to conceptualize that which we acknowledge as the ultimate reality, or what theologian Paul Tillich referred to […]

In the light of our expanded knowledge, God, understood theistically, turned out to be our own creation in which we human beings tried to fit God into words that met our needs. We were seeking to describe our experience of the ultimate, but we had only human words and human concepts with which to do […]

First there was the revolution in astrophysics led by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. In that revolution, the comfortable assumption that God lived just above the sky, watching over us, recording our deeds and misdeeds in the book of life and ready to intervene on our behalf when needed, was challenged. The result was not only […]

In the growth in knowledge about the shape and size of the universe, God was dislodged from the realm we called heaven and in that process God was rendered homeless. As the growth of knowledge continued, all of the things that we once attributed to this theistic definition of God began to be explained with […]

The laws by which the world operates have not changed since the dawn of time, but the way human beings explain and understand those laws has changed dramatically over the centuries of human history. As a direct result of these changes, the primary way that we human beings have conceptualized God has gradually become discredited. […]

“Time makes ancient good uncouth.” The poet, James Russell Lowell, who wrote these words, understood the difference between an experience and the way that experience is explained. So important is this distinction for our later theological work that I want to press it onto the memories of my readers with two rather commonplace illustrations. First, […]

The Bible is not the “word of God!” It never has been. No one who has ever read the Bible in its entirety could possibly defend that suggestion. This bizarre and irrational idea was rather imposed upon this ancient text long after its books had been written, collected and bound together as a single volume. […]

On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a solitary monk named Martin Luther approached the great doors of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on which he planned to post a document entitled The Dispute over the Power and Efficiency of Indulgences. History has renamed it “The 95 Theses.” It was designed to call […]

(Publisher’s note: On November 9th 2015, in Washington, D. C. the national organization known as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, held its annual meeting. Our columnist, John Shelby Spong, delivered the keynote address to this conference. During the business session, by vote of their board of directors, Bishop Spong was presented […]

The plan appears to have been carried out by a group of eight people, three of whom were brothers. The attack seems to have been developed in Belgium in a community known as Molenbeek. At least one of the perpetrators appears to have entered Europe in the tide of refugees fleeing the ravages of the […]

Something happened! Lives were changed. God was redefined. Liturgies were reshaped. New holy days were born. Whatever Easter was, it constituted a transformative moment. It is easy to understand, given the enormity of these changes, how legends would develop to explain the power of the experience. People have a need to explain what has re-oriented […]

Peter had so clearly wanted to be loyal to Jesus following his arrest. The story is told that he tried to follow Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest. Peter had given Jesus his word that even if all others deserted him, he would be there with him; so he tried. This journey into […]

We have now explored our sources, looking where we could beneath the literal words of the biblical texts. We have come to four conclusions. First, whatever the Easter moment was Peter appears to be the person who stood at the center of it. He was the first to “see” or to embrace this new reality. […]

We are told, but only in Luke’s gospel, that when Cleopas and his traveling companion returned from Emmaus to Jerusalem to share their experience of the risen Christ with the disciples, they used these provocative words: “He was made known to us in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35). These interpretive words, written some […]

Life-changing “revelations” may well be timeless, but the one receiving these revelations is always bound in time. These insights invade time at a particular moment. We seek now to discover just when it was that the meaning of Easter first broke into human consciousness. The original Easter story provides us with some time references but, […]

Revelation and insight do not occur in a vacuum. They always come through a person. They have the effect of expanding the being of the recipient by opening his or her eyes to a dimension of reality always present, but usually unperceived. They are not supernatural happenings, but are, as Paul Tillich says, “depth experiences […]

Dear Moderator Cantwell, I write with some alarm at what is happening in the United Church of Canada, a church that I have long admired. I recall your history. Your church decided that women were not to be excluded from ordination long before the first woman ever applied. In 1988 your church proclaimed that homosexual […]

Who was the person who stood in the center of the most dramatic moment in Christian history, the experience we call Easter? Who was it who first saw the meaning of Jesus as the one who transcended all human limits and barriers, including finitude? Who was it who opened the eyes of others to see […]

It was the noted author Jim Bishop, more than a generation ago, who first created a series of books that chronicled the minute-by-minute narratives of what turned out to be crucial events in world history. One thinks of such titles as The Day Lincoln Was Shot or The Day Christ Died. Later, Fox News commentator […]

The couple stood holding hands before the altar where they would soon take their vows to “love, honor and cherish” each other forever. The congregation was in place ready to witness these vows and filling almost every seat. The organist was playing the music associated with “Holy Matrimony.” Everything was ready. This much anticipated event […]

On one stop near the end of my lecture tour of Europe during this summer, I confronted a person whose question drove me back to the series I had been developing in this column about what the Bible actually says about the resurrection of Jesus. It thus helped me to re-orient myself to the discussion […]

“Resurrection-Denying Preacher to Return to Scotland.” That was the headline of a story published in the Glasgow Herald about a week before I was scheduled to lecture in the Cairns Church in Milngavie, a constituent member of the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Senior Pastor of that church, the Rev. Andrew Frater, together with […]

We continue today the chronicle of how my books came to be published in French. In Part I, I described how the translator and the publisher came together. Today I want to look at what happened after that connection was made. With the help of stories in magazines such as Evangele & Liberte and Le […]

Imagine waking up on your birthday in Paris, France. It is mid-June, the air is fresh, and the sun is warm. You can smell the croissants baking. You are in the company of your wife, the person with whom you share your life so completely and with whom you are still deeply in love. That […]

Her name is Muriel. She is the 86 year-old widow of an Irish farmer living near the city of Kilkenny in the southern part of the Irish Republic. She is the mother of seven children, six sons and one daughter. Her youngest son, Peter, now runs the family’s cattle farm, making this family’s economic life […]

This past summer in a lovely chapel quite literally on the coast of Maine, I had the pleasure of baptizing Chapman Thomas Brinegar. A baptism is something I hardly ever do as a bishop, but this baby was the son of very close friends, making my participation in it possible. I used the baptismal liturgy […]

In this column, I turn to the Fourth Gospel to complete our journey through the New Testament. Our purpose has been to see what the New Testament really says about the resurrection of Jesus. When we examine the biblical texts in a thorough manner, we discover, sometimes to our astonishment, that what the Bible actually […]

It was a brutal murder of nine people in an AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The victims, including their pastor, who was also a member of the South Carolina State Senate, were gunned down by a racist killer who wrapped himself in the symbols and rhetoric of the Confederacy. This was not America’s first […]

“Ideas Have Consequences.” That was the title of a book that I was required to read early in my theological education. It was not a profound book, but its title was memorable. We speak today about how certain decisions often produce what we call “unintended consequences.” The world of politics is filled with illustrations of […]

This week, my column takes the form of a letter to my readers. It is an unusual format, but it speaks to the unusual occurrences in our nation this past week. I hope you will read it. I hope you will respond to it. JSS Dear Friends, I am just back from a lecture tour […]

Today, I want to focus on the ambiguity found in the conflicting aspects of Luke’s two resurrection stories in more detail and in more depth. It will help us to see why Luke had to develop a brand new dimension to his story of the resurrection. We noted last week that this author, more than […]

When we come to Luke, the third gospel writer and, counting Paul, the fourth biblical witness to the meaning of Easter, we discover a dramatic shift in the language of resurrection. That language is now much more literal and much more physical. Jesus has clearly been restored, not just to life, but to the physical […]

Matthew is the first gospel writer to narrate an appearance of the risen Christ to anyone. This aspect of the developing Christian story does not begin until the middle years of the ninth decade, which means that appearance stories connected with the risen Christ are written only some 55 years after the crucifixion. Is it […]

Mark’s messenger of the resurrection, described in that gospel as “a young man in a white robe,” had promised a future appearance of the raised Christ to the disciples. It would not, however, occur in Judea or in the environs of Jerusalem. The messenger’s words were quite specific: “He is going before you to Galilee; […]

It is the graduation season. On university and college campuses around the world people gather in a highly-ritualized pageant to mark a point of transition in many areas of human endeavor. Professors and administrators, bedecked in the colorful robes that mark their status and wearing academic hoods that reveal their own university’s colors, process in […]

When we come to the Easter story in the gospel of Matthew, which was written according to the best estimates of the scholars about 10 to 15 years after Mark, we discover two things immediately. First, Matthew was very dependent on Mark, which he clearly had before him as he wrote. Second, Matthew regarded Mark […]

What did the Christian movement know about the resurrection of Jesus before the first gospel was written in the eighth decade of the Christian era? The answer to that question is “not very much.” As I have noted in the first columns in this series, the only records we have that emerge in the years […]

After Easter we opened a new unit of columns designed to study exactly what the Bible says about Jesus’ resurrection. We noted that while resurrection is assumed in every verse of the New Testament, the earliest attempts to say what resurrection actually was did not occur until some twenty-four years after the crucifixion. That came […]

The first writer of what later came to be called the New Testament was a well-educated Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor. His name was Paul, although there is a later tradition that suggested that his original name was Saul and that the change from Saul to Paul was symbolic of the change in his life from being a highly-disciplined member of the Jewish religious elite to being a follower of Jesus. The adjective “Jewish” in that sentence is important because at this time in history, there was no such thing as Christianity or the Christian Church. What we now call Christianity was still a minority movement within the synagogue itself called “The Followers of the Way.” These followers were also known by members of the Orthodox Party of Judaism as “revisionists.” That was a deliberately pejorative title. “Revisionists” in ecclesiastical circles means that they were “change agents” destabilizing the “True Faith.”

The first writer of what later came to be called the New Testament was a well-educated Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor. His name was Paul, although there is a later tradition that suggested that his original name was Saul and that the change from Saul to Paul was symbolic of the change in his […]

On Easter Sunday, a couple of weeks ago now, I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey. I was not alone. Into that church, at one of its four Easter services, came about 300 % more people than we normally would have on a regular Sunday morning. I have no reason […]

The drama of the cross races towards its conclusion. It is a story that runs counter to the cultural expectations. Shaped by the “Servant” figure, drawn from II Isaiah, the image of messiah portrayed in the story of the cross is not that of a powerful winner and a victorious leader, but of one whose […]

Once we begin to see the Passion narrative not as history, but as liturgy that was created to interpret the meaning of Jesus, the literal imprisonment that has been imposed on this story begins to break apart. When that happens the account of the cross reads very differently. Those who know no other way to […]

There are at least three traitor stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. They were all well known to Jewish readers of those scriptures. They would not, however, have been familiar to those Gentile Christians, who became the majority in the Christian movement by the year 150 CE. Most Christians, through the centuries, therefore, tended to be […]

Among the best known characters in the New Testament is the one who is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ.” He is always painted in dark colors, as slinking around corners, shielding his face. It is said of him that “he would do anything for money.” In biblical dramas from Hollywood’s “The King of Kings” to Broadway’s […]

In Matthew’s story of the Passion of Jesus, based as it is on Mark’s original written passion narrative, we can discover by a close analysis the outline of a twenty-four hour vigil. This vigil, based on the pattern of the synagogue vigil of Shavuot or Pentecost that Matthew was the first to develop, consists of […]

It was a strangely emotional moment for me. I was in All Saint’s Church in Austin, Texas, holding in my arms a nine months old baby boy, preparing to baptize him. He was the first grandchild in my only brother’s family, a grandchild he would never see or know. My brother, William Conwell Spong, died […]

If we can demonstrate that Jesus never spoke the words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from the cross, but that rather the earliest gospel writers, Mark and Matthew, lifted those words directly and verbatim out of Psalm 22 in order to place them into Jesus’ mouth in the passion narrative, then […]

We looked last week at the passion narratives in the New Testament. We noted the additions, the deletions and the contradictions found in these central stories of our faith tradition. We asked the obvious questions. How accurate can narratives be when they do not agree with one another? This week, we press deeper into these […]

It is a familiar story. It has been burned into the collective consciousness of the Christian world over the centuries. Many of its elements have long since left their place of origin in the gospel narratives to become part of the secular world. Almost every one of us, whether Christian or not, has heard of […]

In Matthew’s narrative, the Jewish year came to an end with the month of Adar. The Passover would be the first celebration of the New Year which began with the month of Nisan. Passover, according to the Torah, however, did not occur until the 14th and 15th days of the month of Nisan. If Matthew […]

He was one of the giants in the Christian faith during the last 25 years, widely read, widely known and widely respected. He was a quiet man, humble and unassuming, yet simultaneously he was brilliant, provocative and stretching. He was one of the three major shakers and movers of the Jesus Seminar, the other two […]

Most people are not aware that Judaism, at the time of Jesus, had become a missionary, conversion-oriented religion. People all over the Roman Empire were finding their way into synagogues and many of them were deciding to convert. This movement was large enough that the Jewish authorities had to develop a program for the incorporation […]

When the Transfiguration experience was over, Matthew tells us that Jesus and his disciples came down from that mountain. It had been a transformative experience for the disciples, Matthew suggests, because they had seen a new dimension of Jesus’ life opening before them. He has been portrayed in the Transfiguration story as the “New Temple,” […]

  Salome was a dancer, she danced before the king. She wiggled and she wobbled and she shook most everything. The king said, “Salome, there’ll be no scandal here!” Salome said, “To heck with that” and kicked the chandelier! That bit of doggerel is from a song sung at church camp in my youth. It […]

I return this week to our study of Matthew’s gospel after a rather long hiatus, which allowed me the opportunity to address other pressing topics such as my visit to a Nazi Concentration Camp in what is now The Czech Republic, an analysis of the impact of communism on Eastern Europe and finally, what it […]

Dear Friends: As the calendar in the year 2014 dictates this column should arrive at your email address at about 2:00 o’clock A.M. Eastern Standard Time on December 25th. I have a fantasy that all of my east coast readers in the United States set their alarms for 2:00 A.M. each week so that they […]

Christmas will dawn in 2014 in a world gripped by a growing sense of fear. We have recently experienced that pervasive emotion in almost every phase of our life in the United States. The content of that fear has struck our citizens in successive waves: a possible worldwide epidemic, a renewed war in the Middle […]

His name was Charles. His wife of 57 years, and now his widow, was named Cynthia. He was a lawyer who, after ten years and with a wife and three small children, gave up the practice of law to follow his heart. He became an artist of some note and an illustrator of many books. […]

I made my second trip in the last two years behind what was once known as the Iron Curtain recently. There I saw the impact of communism that had been imposed by force of arms on these countries. I also saw what has happened since communism’s fall in the latter years of the 20th century. […]

Writing about the Theological School at Drew University this past week caused me to think about theological education in general and my own theological education in particular. I loved the experience I had at the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Virginia (VTS), but a year after graduating I realized that the gap between what my seminary […]

From time to time, I have an experience inside organized Christianity that is filled with such excitement that it creates in me the hope that there might be a genuine future for the Christian faith. Most frequently this experience takes the form of hearing that someone with some authority within institutional Christianity actually sees, actually […]

In early October of this year, Christine and I had the opportunity to visit a concentration camp at a place called Theresienstadt in what is now the Czech Republic. This camp, known as Terezin, was run during World War II by the Prague Gestapo. Terezin was not normally the final destination of the Jews sent […]

A Dedication-Hanukkah Story How many of you have ever connected the story of Jesus’ transfiguration with the Jewish celebration of Dedication/Hanukkah? We may well have imagined it as almost anything but that. Some New Testament scholars have suggested that the transfiguration story was a “misplaced” resurrection narrative. They cite as evidence for this conclusion that […]

Last week we traced the origins of the Jewish festival known as “Dedication,” but in our day popularly called “Hanukkah.”. It celebrated the moment when a guerilla army of Jewish people, led by man named Judas Maccabeus, dealt a series of hammer-like blows to the army of the Syrians led by their king, Antiochus Epiphanes […]

Matthew, having provided Jesus stories for the Sabbaths between Sukkoth and the final major Jewish festival of the liturgical year, is now ready to relate Jesus to this last celebration. So we turn in our analysis of this gospel to the midwinter festival called Dedication. The Jewish word for dedication is “Hanukkah,” so this celebration […]

Marquette, Michigan, sits on Lake Superior about 300 miles south and slightly east of Thunder Bay, Canada. While we were there, Christine and I were made honorary “Yoopers,” a name derived from the initials UP for Upper Peninsula. It is a remote part of Michigan since its land mass stretches over both Michigan and the […]

In this episode Jesus asks: “Can one read the signs correctly? Does a clear sunset today anticipate fair weather tomorrow? Do dark clouds announce the presence of a storm? Do you not yet understand about the loaves?” When will his disciples accurately perceive who he is? Those are the questions articulated as Matthew draws his […]

In Mark’s gospel she was a Syro-Phoenician woman. Matthew has changed her into being a Canaanite woman. That shift is significant because the term “Canaanite” carried so much more emotional baggage than did the term Syro-Phoenician. Canaanites first come into the Jewish story during the time of Joshua, Moses’ immediate successor. He was the military […]

Sandwiched between Matthew’s two stories of Jesus feeding the multitude is another popular tale in the gospels. It is the account of Jesus walking on the water. Interestingly enough, in each of the four gospels this walking on the water story is coupled with the feeding of the multitudes. All of the gospel writers will […]

Sukkoth is complete. There will be six to eight Sabbaths to engage the synagogue before the next celebration, the festival called Dedication, arrives. In Aramaic the word for “Dedication” is “Hanukkah,” and thus this festival acquired its popular nickname. If Matthew is following the liturgical calendar of the synagogue, as I have maintained, he must […]

Matthew Shifts the Emphasis from Crops to Converts; From Harvest to Judgment Our study last week has helped to make it obvious, I hope, that Matthew borrowed many of the symbols of the Jewish harvest celebration, Sukkoth, and transferred them to the story of Jesus’ passion which came to be associated with and located in […]

Labor Day is over. Little children, carrying new book satchels and wearing new clothes, have found their way back to their schools. University students have returned to their campuses and the football season is well underway. Summer’s vacation time is over. So it is time for this column to return to its theme for the […]

On Monday, August 14, 2014, beginning at 9:30 a.m., my wife Christine and I were seated in the Federal District Courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, preparing to listen to the testimony in the trial of Virginia’s former Republican Governor, Robert McDonnell and his wife Maureen. They were both charged with fraud, corruption and not reporting significant […]

They came mostly from the West Coast, although one was a Methodist minister from Chesterfield, Virginia. They represented the vast array of the traditions in American Christianity. Two were Roman Catholic, some were Episcopalians, several were Presbyterians and American Baptists, but the majority was from the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. […]

It has many elements of a fantasy land. Once one enters the guarded gates, the world seems to fall away quickly. A person living in this community does not read the New York Times, which confronts us on every page with the complexity of modern human life, its sufferings, its joys, its violence and its […]

Patriotism is a powerful force that manifests itself in a variety of ways. One is extreme nationalism. We see that in the behavior of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who is so eager to re-assert Russian hegemony over parts of what was once the Soviet Union that he is willing to destabilize peace by undermining […]

In two lectures in Paris, France, this summer and through various other media, I sought to place into the religious conversation of that nation a new way of looking at Jesus of Nazareth. The majority of both audiences that I addressed consisted of people who still have some relationship with institutional Christianity. The first was […]

(The following is the speech delivered in Paris at the launching of the French Translation of Jesus for the Non-Religious.) How can those of us living in the 21st century understand the Jesus of history? We think very differently from the way the people who wrote the New Testament in the first century thought. Can […]

There is nothing quite like Paris in the springtime. The flowers of the season are in full bloom. The sidewalk cafes are filled with people drinking wine, sipping café au lait and eating croissants. The “Left Bank” is populated with painters standing before their easels and politicians in full debate. The population in this city, […]

Have you ever wondered why the work of Charles Darwin has been so threatening to traditional Christians and to institutional Christianity? In fundamentalist and Bible belt regions of the world, Christians have gone to extraordinary efforts to blunt Darwin’s teaching. One recalls the publication of a series of tracts between 1910 and 1915, which were […]

“Atonement Theology” assumes that human life, though created in the image of God, is now both fallen and evil. It assumes that God is a being who can be “offended” by human disobedience, is incapable of forgiving and must, therefore, exact the deserved punishment on the sinful human life. It assumes that Jesus’ death was […]

In recent columns, we have looked at the origins of what has come to be called “The Doctrine of the Atonement.” We noted that the day, in the calendar of the Jewish liturgical year called “Yom Kippur – The Day of Atonement,” was observed in the fall of the year and was marked by emotions […]

Matthew observes Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, with a flashback story in which John the Baptist, the quintessential Rosh Hashanah figure, although in prison, sends messengers to Jesus asking him to verify his claim to be messiah: “Are you the one that should come or do we look for another?” If my role, he […]

The primary Christian mantra incorporated into our hymns, prayers and sermons is some variation of the phrase: “Jesus died for my sins!” It comes out of a Christian definition of human life as fallen, corrupted by something we call “original sin.” It has given rise over the centuries to a fetish connected with “the blood […]

We return this week to our ongoing study of the gospel of Matthew after a six week hiatus in which we examined, first the use of the concept of a “lamb” in Hebrew worship, after which I wrote on such diverse figures as Barbara Walters, Professor James H. Cone and Pope John XXIII. Since I […]

It was an exciting day in the Vatican on April 27, 2014, probably the most exciting day since the election of Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina to be Pope Francis a little more than a year ago. Prior to that only dark shadows seemed to envelope that church and its leadership. The scandal of sexually abusive […]

So much of Christianity is a delusion, built as it is around power images and institutional claims to possess either an infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible. The Christian Church also traditionally operates out of a definition of life as something evil, fallen and corrupted by original sin, which it has used to enhance guilt […]

She was born to non-practicing Jewish parents. Because her father owned a series of night clubs from Boston to Miami, she grew up in the company of show business celebrities. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, graduating in 1953 with a degree in English. The “glass ceiling” was very much intact in […]

The Lamb Before Its Accusers In addition to the Passover lamb and the lamb of Yom Kippur, there is a third lamb of God in the Jewish tradition. This one is probably the least well known and the least recognized. Yet of the three lambs used in Jewish worship, I believe it has been the […]

Part II:  The Lamb of Yom Kippur Have you ever heard someone say: “Jesus died for my sin?” Have you ever asked what those words meant or how they operated? Have you ever wondered about the origins of such a strange concept? Does it make sense to say that someone had to die for my […]

Part I: The Lamb of Passover I want to interrupt our study of Matthew for a few weeks in order to turn our attention to the great themes of Good Friday and Easter as we live through these aspects of the Christian story. It is an appropriate time to do this. We have now carried […]

Most people, who are related at least tangentially to the Christian faith, assume that Jesus was a miracle worker. By this they mean that he possessed the ability to operate outside the laws of nature in what we would call supernatural ways. This popular image is enforced by the traditional Christian theology, born in the […]

“I believe that all homosexuals should be castrated with rusty barbed wire.” Those words came at me from a television screen a number of years ago. The spokesman was identified as an ordained Christian minister, who headed a Baptist Church in the mid-west. I then learned that this church’s website was “godhatesfags.com.” It was in […]

We suggested last week that Mark, the author of the first gospel to be written, introduced his story of Jesus with a narrative appropriate to the Jewish New Year celebration, a festival called Rosh Hashanah. In that narrative, Mark developed one Rosh Hashanah symbol after another. Jewish New Year was the celebration in which these […]

After a three-week hiatus to consider some pressing theological questions and political issues we return this week to our story of Matthew’s gospel. It was indeed a good place to break away momentarily from Matthew’s text because in the Sermon on the Mount he had reached his first climax and would begin now to introduce […]

We had one of our closest personal friends to dinner recently. He is a stock analyst, a very successful and wealthy man with a passion for understanding the economy. In the course of the evening’s conversation, he listed among the threats to America’s economic prosperity the costs that will be associated with the “Patient Protection […]

Recently in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey, I completed a seven week-lecture series on Matthew’s version of Jesus’ birth. In those lectures I pointed to the elements that demonstrate conclusively to me that Matthew did not intend for this story to be read literally. This was not biology, biography or history. […]

Recently in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey, I completed a seven week-lecture series on Matthew’s version of Jesus’ birth. In those lectures I pointed to the elements that demonstrate conclusively to me that Matthew did not intend for this story to be read literally. This was not biology, biography or history. […]

If it is true, as I have suggested, that Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount then we immediately have to face other startling implications. That conclusion would raise questions about the authenticity of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which is first introduced into the developing Christian tradition in Matthew as part of the Sermon on […]

Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! That needs to be said again and again until it is embraced as a fact. The Sermon on the Mount was composed by the author of Matthew’s gospel in order to fill out his interpretive portrait of Jesus, not only as the messiah, but also as the […]

Matthew is portraying Jesus as the New Moses who went to the top of a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. He is not a reporter for a local newspaper covering an event that actually happened. Matthew is quite specific in his gospel that Jesus is not delivering a new Torah! […]

Matthew is portraying Jesus as the New Moses who went to the top of a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. He is not a reporter for a local newspaper covering an event that actually happened. Matthew is quite specific in his gospel that Jesus is not delivering a new Torah! […]

It was a very unusual memorial service. It was not held in a church, a synagogue or a temple, but in the Avery Fisher Hall of the Lincoln Center in New York City. That vast and beautiful symphony space will seat 2783 people and except for the boxes in the top tier, it was filled. […]

It should not be surprising that a Jewish scribe in the first century, which is what the author of the gospel we call Matthew was, would make constant references to Moses, the founder of the Jewish faith tradition. Moses dominated official Judaism and was in every way its creator and guide. The Torah by which […]

Matthew has thus far mined the Hebrew Scriptures for texts that will advance his thesis that Jesus has fulfilled the Jewish messianic expectations. In the opening genealogy, he has made Jesus “the son of Abraham,” the son and heir of King David and portrayed him as one who with his people survived the Babylonian exile. […]

It was January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, sometimes called “Old Christmas” in some parts of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The church was still decorated with its hanging greens and beautiful poinsettias. After all this was the twelfth day of Christmas. About thirty people gathered with me on that day to attend a wedding […]

Matthew never allows us to forget that he is a learned scribe in charge of a synagogue made up of Jewish people who are the followers of Jesus. He is writing at a time in history when a battle is being waged for the soul of Judaism. The issues were clear in his mind. Will […]

From time to time I receive a letter which requires an answer that is too long for the question and answer format of this column, so I have to use it as the column itself. Such is the case this week, so I will interrupt my Matthew series for a week to respond to this […]

On December 9, 2013, 65,000 people braved strong rains to gather in the Olympic Soccer Field in South Africa to pay tribute to a man named Nelson Mandela. They were joined by over one hundred heads of state from around the world, the largest number ever to attend a funeral service for a king, a […]

The wise men from Matthew’s birth story have been deeply attached to our Christmas celebration, stretching all the way back to the time that Matthew introduced them in the middle years of the ninth decade of the Common Era. They are instantly recognized mounted on their camels and appearing in our Christmas cards, our decorated store […]

Matthew’s opening genealogy of Jesus is now complete with the intriguing idea that the line which produced Jesus of Nazareth, traveled not only through the royal family of the house of David, but also through four “tainted’ women: Tamar, who engaged in incest; Rahab, who was called a prostitute; Ruth, who achieved her goals through […]

Spain is a nation of 47 million people located on the southwestern part of the continent of Europe. It almost touches North Africa at Gibraltar and thus has a much closer contact with the African continent than any other European nation, including in its population a significant number of Muslim persons. It is one of […]

Every nation I visited on my recent European lecture tour has a National Health System, paid for by tax dollars and run for all the people by the government itself. Contrary to the propaganda of the American political right, these health services are well run and enormously popular in both conservative and liberal circles. The […]

It was probably the most exciting and fulfilling book tour of my entire career. Over a period of thirty days, I journeyed through Europe delivering sixteen public lectures in Spain, Italy, England and Scotland. We also touched Switzerland and Wales. In Wales we spent the night and met with Peter Francis, the warden of the […]

It is difficult for most Christians to imagine that the story of Jesus’ virgin birth was a late developing tradition in the Christian faith, yet it appears to have been totally unknown until it is introduced in the middle years of the ninth decade in the writings of Matthew. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth is […]

The audience for which Matthew wrote was conversant with the Jewish Scriptures, so when he mentions Tamar in the genealogy, they would know her story. The Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was read in its entirety in the traditional synagogues on the Sabbaths of a single year. The 38th chapter of Genesis, where […]

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” — that is how the gospel of Matthew begins. The word “genealogy” means “origins,” beginnings. It could thus also be translated the book of the “genesis” of Jesus, the messiah. For “genesis” is what is being described in this […]

Having now introduced you to a different way of reading the gospel of Matthew, and puncturing for you, I hope forever, the assumption that this book along with all the other gospels was ever intended to be either history or biography, I want in this column to double back and focus on the gospel of […]

Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! Some of the content recorded in that well-known part of Matthew’s gospel may well stretch back to the literal words of the Jesus of history, but there was never a time in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when he went up on a mountain and delivered […]

“We have had our run. It is time to leave.” Andy Pettitte, Pitcher for the New York Yankees They had four related careers that impacted the baseball world for two decades. In the history of modern sports this was a rare achievement. In their late teens and early twenties, these young athletes began playing baseball […]

He was my Professor of Theology, teaching me for two of the three years I was in Seminary. For me he was the major voice on that 1950’s faculty that had broken new theological ground. Most of the others were still locked in the dated Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth, which was rooted in the despair […]

Springfield is Missouri’s third largest city. Its approximately 160,000 people occupy space in the southwestern part of that state, where this city serves as the county seat of Greene County. Tradition, not fully documented, suggests that it got its name from an early settler, named James Wilson, who offered whiskey to anyone who would vote […]

Using the gospel of Matthew as our guide we have begun the task of opening the background necessary to grasp, as members of the current generation of Christians, the meaning of all the gospels. This is necessary because all of the gospels are Jewish books written by Jewish authors for Jewish congregations. They employ Jewish […]

It has been both an emotional and a political roller-coaster. The television newscasters and the print media informed us that a political debate was underway as to whether or not the armed might of this country should be used to punish the Syrian government for violating the universal condemnation against chemical warfare that has governed […]

I return to Matthew’s gospel today to lay out the case for its basic Jewishness. As I suggested in the opening column in this series last week, we must see all the books of the New Testament as Jewish writings before we can properly begin to understand them. Matthew is by every measure the most […]

The Bible is the Christian Church’s sacred text. We read from it at every worship service in almost every Christian tradition. It is apparently a rather popular volume for every year since the invention of the printing press it has been the world’s best-selling book. It might well be, however, the world’s least understood and […]

Over the past few years, while working on my recent book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I became fascinated with how the author of John’s gospel develops the characters in his narrative. There are more memorable characters in the Fourth Gospel than anywhere else in the New Testament. The disciple Thomas is […]

Theology is a rational, deeply human, attempt to explain our experience with God. Theology is, therefore, never primary; it is always secondary to experience. Theological explanations can thus never be eternal. All explanations not only will change, but must change when knowledge grows and by so doing will always invalidate previous conclusions. Theology can never […]

One of my readers, Henry Gael Michaels, has shared with me an anonymous story on the meaning of God with which I open this column. It also reveals, I believe, what is wrong with all theology. I am grateful for this gift. This is his story. The mystic was back from the desert. “Tell us,” […]

There are some moments in life when the transcendent is expressed inside the mundane; where the eternal seems to enter the passage of time. They are moments, usually unexpected, perhaps not even recognized until later. I had such a moment earlier this year that will not go away and so I have decided to write […]

The largest city in the Texas Panhandle is Amarillo, which has a population somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 people. Amarillo had its beginning as a result of being a midpoint on a railroad line that connected Fort Worth with Denver. With that connection established, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the Chicago, Rock […]

Drew University is my neighborhood institution of higher learning. It offers to Morris County, New Jersey, the enrichment that only a university can bring. There is a magnificent library on this campus that has three constituent parts: The University Library, a Theological Library and the Methodist Archives, in which the history of American Methodism is […]

The Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, is the Most Reverend George Pell. He is a tall, impressive-looking man, whose career in his church has followed the traditional path of those who become significant Catholic leaders. He, like most upwardly mobile priests, received at least part of his training in the Pontifical College of […]

The United States celebrated its 237th birthday this past week. It seems, therefore, a fitting time for some moments of national reflection. In today’s column I seek to identify some of the forces that now appear to hold this nation in its grip. America is, I believe, going through an identity transition in which a […]

I was surprised at how elated I felt on June 26 when the Supreme Court handed down its two historic decisions affecting gay and lesbian people. The first decision mandated federal recognition of gay and lesbian couples in states that permit same-sex marriage by declaring the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to be unconstitutional. The […]

He may have had fewer obvious gifts than any person I ever watched in a position of significant power and authority. He was not an impressive personality. One would describe him more as homespun than as notable. He was more like a favorite uncle or a comfortable neighbor. He was not particularly tall, perhaps stretching […]

Luke concludes his birth story with a series of episodes designed to point to the story of the adult Jesus. First, in Luke’s story, the shepherds depart, while Mary “ponders,” then the “Holy Family” goes through the initiation rites of Judaism to root Jesus deeply inside of the faith of his people. He is circumcised, […]

The creators of the birth narratives, Matthew and Luke, used two motifs in interpreting the life of Jesus of Nazareth. First, each was historically aware that Jesus hailed from Galilee, indeed from the village of Nazareth. Too often the gospels report that there was debate about his origins for this not to be true. Galilee was the rustic, […]

When writing the opening chapter of my soon-to-be released book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I felt the need to issue a warning to my readers. This warning needed to go in two quite different directions. There will certainly be those who think of themselves as “traditionally religious people,” who may well […]

The publication date is June 11, 2013. The books will actually be shipped to bookstores across the nation in the last week of May. The rights to publish this in Italian and Korean have also been sold and these two translations will appear in their two respective countries later in the year. I live now […]

The Third Annual John Shelby Spong Lecture was held at St. Peter’s Church, Morristown, New Jersey, near the end of April. A crowd of people, numbering around 400, according to the ushers’ count, came from near and far to participate in the event. We had members of the faculty and student body from nearby Drew University. We had […]

In order to understand the birth narratives found in Matthew and Luke, we need to embrace the fact that there is no way these stories were intended to be regarded as remembered history or as narratives that were literally true. That must be stated clearly. This means that there never was a star in the […]

Somewhere six to ten years after the Gospel of Matthew was written, another gospel, the one we call Luke, makes its appearance. Both Matthew and Luke had Mark as a common source although Matthew used it more extensively than Luke. Some scholars also believe that Matthew and Luke had a second common source, a collection […]

Having now described the miraculous birth of Jesus in chapter one of his gospel, Matthew turns next to his account of how the birth of Jesus was divinely “rolled out” to bring it to the attention of all the people of the world. His vehicle for this is to tell us a story of magi […]

On Monday, April 15, Patriot’s Day in Boston, Massachusetts, the bomb blasts that occurred near the finish line of the Boston Marathon brought death, mutilation and injury to more than 200 innocent people. By Thursday, the perpetrators of this crime had been identified and the manhunt was on. By Friday, one of the two suspects […]

+A message to my readers: After the deadline for the publication of this column the terrorist bombing at the end of the Boston marathon occurred, leaving many of us enraged, saddened and despairing about the levels of violence that apparently engulf the world. It also put the content of this column into a new perspective. […]

Christianity was born in the synagogue and the original followers of Jesus were primarily observant Jews. They gathered in the synagogue regularly on the Sabbath for worship. A major part of that worship consisted of reading, learning about and becoming conversant with the sacred scriptures as the Jews understood them. Each Sabbath there were three […]

Holy Week, including Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were especially meaningful to me this year. So was the celebration of Easter. In this column today I would like to be very personal and tell you just why that was so in 2013. I know it is difficult for someone outside the office of […]

Mark, the earliest gospel to be written (ca. 72 CE) locates the crucifixion of Jesus in the season of Passover, suggesting that the “Last Supper” was a Passover meal. Matthew, the second gospel to be written (ca, 82-85), and Luke, the third (ca. 88-93), follow Mark’s lead and between the three of them the Passover-crucifixion […]

His name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but the world will know him as Pope Francis I. He was a surprise selection by the Conclave of Cardinals voting in the Sistine Chapel and he received the required majority of 77 votes on the third ballot cast, a unifying fact. He is from the “Third World,” that […]

Reclaiming Good Friday as a major focus of both Lent and the Christian story will be at the center of my life this year, when I spend that day in Richmond, Virginia, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. This is the church I served as Rector from 1969-1976 and it is a church to which I […]

A few months before the startling announcement of his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI published a book on the birth narratives of Jesus as found in the New Testament. It was a book promised in the publication of a previous book by this Pope, entitled Jesus of Nazareth, which I reviewed in this column more than […]

The world in general and members of the Roman Catholic Church in particular were shocked at the recent announcement that Pope Benedict XVI was resigning the papal office at the end of February. A moment of transition for this church has arrived. The stated reason for this unusual resignation was age and infirmity, but as is […]

Reading the Bible with any real comprehension in the 21st century is not an easy task. The gospels are a product of the 1st century, a dramatically different time, and they reflect a vastly different culture. They do not translate easily. Most Christians do not realize that Christianity itself was born in the womb of […]

The prologue to Mathew’s gospel, which also serves to introduce the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, is now complete. Matthew writing as he does to the members of a traditional Jewish community, who were also the followers of Jesus, has grounded the life of Jesus deeply into Jewish history. Jesus is the son of Abraham, […]

There are times when listening to the political debate in this country that I am absolutely astonished. Many of the participants in the current struggles regarding the proposed limitation on assault weapons, or making background checks for gun ownership universal, appear to be responding to a world that I do not believe exists. The debate […]

He was a remarkable man, a superior lawyer and one who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He had many, many friends and I was privileged to be one of them. I knew him for 35 of his 107 years. More than that, I knew him in some deeply personal settings. I […]

Inauguration day in America is a time of transition, the proper moment to articulate the hopes and dreams of the future. These things are more vivid if the one to be inaugurated is just beginning his or her presidency, but even when it is the beginning of a second term for a sitting president, it […]

The fourth and final woman included in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus with which he opens his gospel and simultaneously introduces into the Christian tradition the story of the virgin birth, is the best known of them all. Matthew in this genealogy, however, does not ever call her by her name. He refers to her rather […]

The third woman mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus is also unique in a number of ways. Her name is Ruth and she, like Rahab, is a foreigner. Rahab was a Canaanite citizen of Jericho. Ruth was a Moabite, and the widow of a Jewish man named Mahlon. Her story is found in the tiny […]

The second woman mentioned in the genealogy of Matthew comes out of a story told in the book of Joshua. One can read the details in chapters two and six of that book. There are two things that are noteworthy about this woman. First, she is not a Jew, rather she is a citizen of […]

Throughout the past few years, and certainly as a factor in the recent American presidential race, the state of the economy has been front and center. An important aspect of this debate is our sense of increasing globalization that ties all nations into a single world economy. The Dow Jones Average has been whipsawed by […]

It was a uniquely Spanish event held in the beautifully ornate Athenaeum in downtown Madrid. It followed the format of a carefully orchestrated, intellectual and cultural pattern. The audience numbered over 300 participants. It began at 7:00 p.m. and lasted until 10:00 p.m. after which we went out to dinner. That was not late night […]

Matthew is the gospel writer (82-85) who first introduced the story of Jesus’ miraculous or virgin birth into the tradition. He did so with the seventeen most boring verses in the entire Bible! (See Matt. 1:1-17) These verses are Matthew’s version of the genealogy of Jesus, but we refer to them the “who begat whom” […]

The familiar stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth entered the Christian tradition in two different forms, separated by perhaps a decade. The original narrative was written by a man we have named Matthew somewhere between 82-85. The later narrative was written by a man we call Luke somewhere between 89-93. The second story is by far […]

The familiar stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth entered the Christian tradition in two different forms, separated by perhaps a decade. The original narrative was written by a man we have named Matthew somewhere between 82-85. The later narrative was written by a man we call Luke somewhere between 89-93. The second story is by far […]

The first gospel to be written, the one we call Mark, was composed in the early years of the 8th decade (70-72). It contains no story of and no reference to the birth of Jesus. To explain this omission, there are only two possibilities: Either the author of Mark had never heard about the birth […]

The votes have been cast, counted and the results have been made known.  Radio and television stations are no longer relentlessly broadcasting anti-Obama and anti-Romney ads.  The emotions of both victory and defeat have been experienced and expressed.  The “blame game” is well underway.  The 2012 election is over.  President Obama has four more years […]

In the writings of Paul, there is not a single reference to a supernatural birth tradition, regarding Jesus of Nazareth.  That is a fact easily established.  Determining what that fact means is a bit more complicated. Does this omission mean that Paul was unaware of this part of the Christian tradition?  Is it possible that […]

Most of the portraits of the mother of Jesus that hang in the great museums of the world are dependent first on the biblical stories of Jesus’ birth and second on the presumed appearances of his mother at the foot of the cross.  Take those two traditions away from the New Testament and the mother […]

Try to imagine, if you can, a woman who was a Roman Catholic nun for 18 years, working during those years on a Native American reservation and later taking the level of academic training required of those who wish to become Roman Catholic priests.  Next try to imagine this same women wondering just why it […]

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Newark, the Most Reverend John J. Myers, has recently issued “A Pastoral Teaching on the Definition, Purpose and Sanctity of Marriage.”  In this document, which is clearly politically motivated, he urges “faithful Catholics” and other “men and women of goodwill” to vote against any candidate for public office who supports […]

Behind the narratives of Easter contained in the gospel tradition was an experience that was undeniable, powerful and true to the followers of Jesus.  That experience exploded upon them in a manner that words could not capture, but it left its mark on them in indelible ways.  Because of whatever that experience was their lives […]

A major debate in this year’s presidential election eliciting great emotion and spirited rhetoric relates to “the size and role of the federal government.”  A study of American history reveals that this theme has been part of every campaign since our nation’s founding in 1776.  It has become a once every four-year ritual, complete with […]

The literal details are familiar: the third day, the empty tomb, the experience of seeing the risen Christ.  These details stand at the heart of the Christian story, forming its essential climax if you will.  It is celebrated annually in Easter services, normally with packed congregations.  Its secular observances involve Easter parades, Easter egg hunts […]

Dear Ross, A few weeks ago in an op-ed piece of the Sunday New York Times, you began your regular column with these words, “In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Bishop of Newark, published a book entitled, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.”  Spong was a uniquely radical figure – during his […]

It is certainly a fact of history that a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans somewhere around the year 30 CE.  This crucifixion came during the procuratorship of a Roman official named Pontius Pilate, who was in his Judean post according to Roman records between the years 26 and 36 CE.  […]

The nominating conventions for both parties are visible now only through the rearview window. The banners have been taken down, the balloons have fallen, the local bars are back to their normal patrons and the campaigns are now in full swing.  The nominating conventions are actually a strange ritual, something of a dated hangover from […]

Somewhere between a third and forty percent of each of the four gospels in the New Testament is concerned with the last week in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  Clearly that was the focus of the gospel narratives – that was the emphasis of their message. Mark’s gospel has even been described as “the […]

All of us are mentored in life by other people.  Sometime this mentoring is done by example, sometimes by words.  An essential aspect of maturity is to recognize those from whom we have learned, so from time to time in this column I pay tribute to my mentors.  The catalyst for this column today came […]

For the past twelve years, my wife Christine and I have vacationed in the mountains of Western North Carolina, an area that once was a vital part of my childhood.  We rent a house for a week, sometimes two, in the community around the High Hampton Inn and Golf Club.  Neither of us plays golf […]

I spent a week recently teaching in the summer session of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.  It was a demanding schedule of four hours a day from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on each of the five days of that week.  This opportunity forced me to think about the state of theological […]

Before leaving my brief analysis of the miracle stories of the New Testament, I want to look at what is probably the best known miraculous act attributed to Jesus in the entire gospel tradition.  That is the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  It is a narrative told only in the Fourth Gospel (John 11), […]

When most people think of the miracles included in the gospels, they usually think of a broad series of apparently supernatural acts. They tend not to be familiar with the intimate details of the biblical narrative.  When those details are revealed, questions are inevitably raised as to the purpose the gospel writer had in mind […]

Sometimes, as one goes about the normal duties of one’s professional life, a pattern of activity slowly becomes visible until one wonders why this had not been seen before.  When that happens, it is good to stop, to notice, to put the pieces together, to seek to understand and then to formulate the new insight […]

At first the details sounded painfully familiar.  It was, the defendants said, a matter of misplaced loyalties, of valuing the reputation of the institution above all other considerations.  This institution had a long history of service and respect. Many people identified themselves with it.  It raised enormous amounts of money in both gifts and revenues […]

It is a rare treat in the life of a bishop in general and in the life of a retired bishop in particular to participate in a pastoral act like a baptism.  It normally has to come at the invitation of a family member or a very close friend.  Seven years ago I married a […]

Today, as a part of the overall series entitled “Think Different–Accept Uncertainty,” I want to begin to press this mini-unit on the miracle stories of the gospels toward a conclusion.  My concern has been to show modern readers that these miraculous narratives found in the gospels were always symbolic, interpretive stories rather than supernatural accounts […]

Last week I introduced you, my readers, to an interfaith “think tank” in which I shared recently at a conference center known as the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.  Some fifty leaders from among all the major religious systems of the world gathered there to explore the common ground that might lead to deeper […]

Recently I was part of an intensive two-day “think tank” experience on “The Future of Interfaith Cooperation,” which asked the question as to whether the religious violence that marks so much of our world can ever be overcome and be replaced with interfaith understanding and cooperation.  This “think tank” was sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution […]

Last week, we began to look at the miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels.  Most of them are familiar stories to those of us raised in the Christian faith.  When I was a young child growing up in North Carolina, I was taught that the miracles were both demonstrations of Jesus’ divinity as well […]

Deconstruction is always easier to do than reconstruction, but it is not nearly so important.  It is never enough to say who or what Christ is not, but we must move on to say who or what Christ is.  The task is complicated, however, by the very fact that the Jesus story, as related in […]

Her name was Janet Robinson and I met her shortly after my 12th birthday.  She was a member of my church and active as a Sunday school teacher.  She was an unmarried lady in her late forties or early fifties.  She was a stocky, heavy-set woman, but no one would have referred to her as […]

In my studies of the origins of life and its evolution, I have become convinced that the traditional and primitive claim that involves the concept of “original sin” has got to go!  This mythological misunderstanding was based on the assumption that human life began perfect, but that we had our perfection destroyed by our disobedience, […]

When the President of the United States, announced his support for gay marriage, the political landscape began to roil and I was filled with two quite opposite sets of emotions. First, there were the positive feelings.  There was enormous joy when I thought of what this would mean to close friends of mine who have […]

They were a very happy young couple. Both the wife and the husband were successful professionally. They had worked hard to achieve this success, postponing much of what young adults think of as fun in order to pursue their goals. They were in their early thirties when they met, fell in love and decided to […]

Perhaps it takes a political campaign to reveal the fault lines in both our nation and in institutional religion.  At least that is what appears to be happening in current American politics.  The political season has a way of loosening latent fears, exciting the extremists and bringing silliness to the political arena.  We have watched […]

What does it mean to be human?  What does it mean to be alive?  Why are we constituted the way we are?  What was there and what is there about our humanity that caused our ancestors to develop a mythological understanding of human life, portraying it as fallen and infected with what they called “original […]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr. Rowan Williams, has recently announced his plans to retire at year’s end. This announcement was greeted with little notice or emotion.  This fact may be attributed to the declining influence in the Western world of religion in general and of Christianity in particular or […]

In the early spring of this year the Jesus Seminar paid me a special tribute at its meeting held in Salem, Oregon.  First, I was invited to give two lectures to the assembled hosts of scholars and guests on “Changing the Christian Paradigm from Salvation to Wholeness.”  Next, I was featured in an hour long, […]

The argument before the Supreme Court as to whether the Federal government can mandate health insurance for all citizens represents a fascinating dance around shifting realities.  It is an argument that totters between the values inherent in an interdependent society and those cherished by an individualistic society.  The reality is, however, that in an ever-shrinking […]

The way Christians have told the Christ story, beginning with Augustine in the fourth century and continuing through Anselm in the twelfth century, is to postulate an original and perfect creation from which human life has fallen.  This original perfection was first perverted and then lost by an act of human disobedience. At least that […]

In the beginning all was good, said the oldest biblical story of creation (Gen. 2:4b-3:24).  That goodness was symbolized by the portrait of life in the Garden of Eden, a garden that contained everything for which a human being could yearn.  There was ample water, fruit and vegetation.  The author of the story even asserted […]

Note: See the Announcements section for a clarification on the order of the entries in this series. Bad theology is inevitable when it is based on bad anthropology!  That is, the way we understand human life always determines the way we understand God. This becomes very clear when religious people begin to grapple with and […]

Here is some of the evidence. In Virginia, the State Legislature was poised to pass and Republican Governor Bob McDonnell to sign a bill requiring a vaginally-invasive medical procedure be performed on any woman seeking an abortion until a massive demonstration of female voting power caused them to “modify” it very slightly. In the United […]

In this series we have looked at the changing understanding of God throughout human history. We have tried to separate the God experience of transcendence, wonder and awe from the God explanation that has ranged from animism to fertility cults and mother worship to a God understood after the analogy of a tribal chief and […]

I never thought I would live long enough to see birth control become a major political issue.  Nor did I think I would ever hear the desire to provide women with safe and effective contraception be referred to as “a war on religion on the part of the Obama administration.”  Granted that presidential election years […]

Before proceeding with this series, I want to return to my theme of last week and examine the concept of theism more closely.  In so doing, I run the risk of repetition, but so crucial is this idea in the development of this series that I am willing to do that in order to make […]

Defining the human experience that we call God is not just a modern activity, human beings have engaged in this task since the dawn of civilization. The factor driving the change in the human definition of God was never a new revelation from on high; it was always a dramatic shift in human life usually […]

An article on homosexuality, which appeared recently on the Op-Ed page of the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis, calls into question the decision on the part of that paper’s editors to publish this piece. The article, signed by Don Nye of Edina, revealed no competence to address this subject and revealed little more than uninformed prejudice.  I […]

A recent letter from an Anglican priest in Canada revealed what this priest believes to be the dire straits into which Christianity has fallen in that gentle land to our north. 

I recently read Walter Isaacson’s provocative and fascinating biography of Steve Jobs, the founder of the Apple Corporation.  He was innovative, iconoclastic, weird and a genius.  He built his company not only into a successful giant, but made it the highest valued company in the entire world.  One of Steve Job’s secrets was that he […]

His name was David Watt Yates.  As an Episcopal priest he fought for the integration of the races in North Carolina in the 1940’s!  He was a conscientious objector during World War II even in the face of such compelling moral issues as theories of the “Master Race” and the reality of the Holocaust.  He […]

There are times when one’s perceptions are challenged and one’s stereotypical prejudices are shattered.  This happened to me in recent days when I fulfilled invitations to speak in three cities that one thinks of as traditional, heartland cities.  They were Birmingham, Alabama, Tupelo, Mississippi, and Kansas City, Missouri.  I share with my readers these experiences […]

A note to my readers:  This column ran first in the fall of 2010 or about 15 months ago in this exact form.  It was not regarded as controversial.  The political situation in America, however, has shifted dramatically in those 15 months making this column read very differently in the present context.  I suspect it […]

A Note to my Readers: Many years ago, in 1974 to be specific, for the sermon at the Christmas Eve Midnight service at St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, I sought to redefine Jesus through the medium of poetry.  I could, even then, no longer see him with credibility as the incarnation of a supernatural […]

This church was built in 1866 by John J. Harris to be used as an Episcopal summer chapel serving vacationers in the Lake George, New York area.  In 1869 it was deeded to the vestry of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Glen Falls, New York.  It was closed in 1883.  It re-opened in […]

It was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for my wife Christine.  It turned out to be a moment of insight into life itself.  For that reason alone I share this experience with my readers. On a recent trip to Switzerland and Italy, we added a couple of days in England, the land of Christine’s […]

Italy is a Roman Catholic country!  That was stated time after time as we journeyed through Florence, Tuscany and the Cinque Terre.  The signs of this faith tradition were everywhere.  The major tourist attractions in Italy, ranging from the Vatican to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the storied museums of the land in which […]

There was a sense of disgust, followed by feelings of despair when the super committee formed to deal with the budget deficit failed to accomplish anything.  This committee had been given enormous legislative power.  Any conclusion to which they agreed would go to the Senate and House of Representatives to be voted up or down […]

The Florence Museum, known in Italy as the Musei Firenze, is best known for the massive marble statue of the youthful King David sculpted by Michelangelo.  Housed in the section of the museum known as the Galleria dell’Accademia, this magnificent work of rare genius was accomplished with meticulous detail designed to reveal the beauty and […]

On November 8, 2011, my publisher, Harper-Collins, released my newest book under the title Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  The date of a book’s release is always a significant day in the life of an author, not unlike, I can at least imagine, the way a mother must feel when she gives birth […]

One of the signs of our radically interdependent world is that the economic problems of Europe have become the primary catalyst in the American stock market fluctuations over the past few months.  We have thus become quite familiar with talk of Greece’s default, with downgrades on Italian banks and with constant rumors of the collapse […]

Several years ago, while in England, I was invited to participate on a two-hour television program hosted by Melvin Bragg, now Sir Melvin Bragg, on the UK’s ITV channel. The topic was the future of religion in general and of Christianity in particular.  There were three other panelists one of whom was Christopher Hitchens, well […]