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’ …
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.