Sunday, September 30, 2018
In college, I heard about people joining Christian accountability groups. I later found out that some of these groups were really friends self-reporting their sinful behaviors—swearing, drinking, sex and lustful thoughts—but without an accountability or expectation of...
Saturday, September 29, 2018
A member of my family of choice recently changed his last name to St. Michael—he shares his birthday with the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels. As we remember Saint Michael, a being that moved to and from this life and the great beyond, it is fitting to...
Friday, September 28, 2018
I have lived in an intentional community for the last four years. Together, we are covenanted and committed to sharing our life rhythms and acting within shared values and common work. The five of us are, like the early church, attempting to work out lives as...
Thursday, September 27, 2018
A few years ago, I spent a week in the Taizé ecumenical monastic community in France. Brother Roger, an incredible peacemaker, started the community in 1940, and thousands of people visit each year, seeking spiritual solace. The worship style of Taizé features a...
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
I often wonder how much has changed since the time of the psalmist. We are still asking the same questions of God and our neighbor. In the psalms of lament, the poetry nearly always turns toward faith in God, trust in God’s goodness, and a call for spiritual...
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
God chooses to come into the world through a body and into a body. Mary grows and eventually groans another human body into the world. Today, we see the Holy Spirit coming to earth in physical form. Jesus’ ministry is so deeply tactile—he is touching and eating...
Monday, September 24, 2018
I live in an intentional community in a house on eight acres of land. There are five humans in our house. We pray, eat, and do social justice work together alongside fifteen chickens, a beehive, and the inhabitants of the surrounding forest. We have a vegetable...
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Once upon a time, I lived in an Episcopal Service Corps volunteer community. This was a high-commitment, high-emotional-stakes endeavor. We purposely entered into tender conversations and tried to work through immense differences in an effort to build a caring...
Saturday, September 22, 2018
What an honor to receive such a critique: to be turning the powers upside down, to be following Jesus and not the empire! Historically, this was the day when the fool was a king and the king a fool, when masked tricksters roved the streets and criticized the...
Friday, September 21, 2018
In La Teológia de Liberación, Gustavo Gutierrez, a Roman Catholic priest writing in the 1970’s in Peru, explains the central tenet of Catholic social teaching: the “preferential option for the poor.” This teaching helps us understand that the poor among us hear the...
Thursday, September 20, 2018
I’m a part of a Christian arts troupe called Carnival de Resistance. For one month each year, thirty artist/activists live together in a sustainable eco-village. We perform liturgical theater productions under a circus big top, animating the voices of ancient prophets...
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
My Korean great-grandmother immigrated to Hawaii as a “picture bride” and was married to a stranger in a Maui sugarcane camp. She settled with her family in central Oahu and had a legendary garden behind her house. When she visited Korea, she always smuggled seeds...
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
It is audacious for the chief priests to threaten Lazarus with death, a man who has already been there and back again. But this overarching audacity is also part and parcel of the ways those in power work against Jesus—trying to stamp out all signs of hope, to...
