Monday, September 17, 2018
The darkness of the world threatens to overwhelm me sometimes. From individual encounters with people who disappoint me to large-scale global tragedies, the darkness can feel like more than the human heart was wired to hold. Notably, Psalm 56 makes no distinction...
Sunday, September 16, 2018
This passage from Proverbs reminds me that wisdom is often gained by direct experience in the wide world rather than from being buried in a book. I was a self-proclaimed pacifist for the first eighteen years of my life. Then I traveled to the Holy Land with a group of...
Saturday, September 15, 2018
God is so sassy in this passage, and I love it. Like a mother taking her own child to task, here we see God reminding Job about exactly who Job is and who God is: “Remember this planet you’re standing on? Yeah, I did that. And where were you?”This passage...
Friday, September 14, 2018
One of the many revolutionary gospel ideals—one that deeply moves me—is downward mobility, the idea of choosing to forsake power rather than grow it. So many societal problems would be solved if this ideal were ingrained in our collective consciousness. Radical folk...
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Job is describing how our personal behavior can be affected and changed depending upon the audience. It is much easier to take radical action amongst allies and people who share the same beliefs than it is amongst dissenters. Inciting conflict is not something most of...
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
I grew up on the outskirts of coal country, where mining is more than a job—it also brings a sense of self to those who work the mines. Coal has fallen out of favor in search of cleaner energy—the job losses are as violent an extraction as the mining process itself—...
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
In this brief snippet from John’s Gospel, we remember that Jesus’ life was constantly under threat during his ministry. It is all too easy to read these short anecdotes at arms’ length. In this passage, we see Jesus returning to his hometown and nearly being run off a...
Monday, September 10, 2018
The Age of Enlightenment didn’t do us any favors in terms of learning how to trust human intuition. Hundreds of years later, I still feel programmed to rely on measurable outcomes that claim to be without bias. I thank God for people who have helped me unlearn that...
Sunday, September 9, 2018
I work with a lot of young transgender people. Of the countless struggles in the lives of these kids, one of the most common is with their own names. Several of them refer to their birth names as “dead names.” They share some deeply theological understandings about...
Saturday, September 8, 2018
I first encountered visual artist Brandan Odums when I saw his mural of a young black woman wearing a shirt that proclaimed, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” Lately, I’ve been compelled by women and men who are writing about the ways in which white supremacy cuts...
Friday, September 7, 2018
There’s an exercise I’ve done in therapy a few times when I am in a fraught relationship or feeling stuck or in a time of immense stress. I imagine that I make the decision to walk away from my life and move to a beach somewhere and start completely fresh, washing the...
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Earlier this year, I spent time at Standing Rock, living together with other people as an embodied witness against the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline runs through sacred tribal land and under the drinking water of millions of people. What an...
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
When I was in middle school, my friend’s grandmother took a hiatus from attending worship because her Episcopal church had stopped saying the confession before Holy Eucharist. “If I can’t confess my sins before I eat the Lord’s Supper, I may as well not take...
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
“If you give someone a fish, they’ll eat for a day. If you teach them to fish, they’ll eat for a while longer. If you organize against the privatized water system and get fishing rights for all, maybe everyone will have food.” That’s a rough translation of a quotation...
Monday, September 3, 2018
I studied liberation theology and African-American history in college. I learned about the pitfalls of global capitalism and the preferential option for the poor. And I immersed myself in the stories of political revolution, nonviolent resistance, and the radical...
