House for All Sinners & Saints was only about a year old when I took a Sunday morning phone call from a young parishioner who had gone home to Grand Rapids for a weekend visit. I …

I talk to a lot of people who grapple with religious doubts. Many of them harbor doubts about traditional faith, including a personal, supernatural, providential, and interventionalist God. An even larger number of them express doubts about institutional religion.

Are you curious why the church is “way out of tune” with today’s times?
…how a 21st century None, Done or Discouraged might be attracted to a 21st century understanding of church and Jesus??

The least of the Olympics’ concerns should be that of swim caps for black hair. However, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) of the IOC said the design of the swim caps does not fit “the natural form of the head,” a statement eerily reminiscent of the Eugenics Movement propaganda to substantiate both black anatomical and intellectual inferiority. 

Some things done in the name of God by people of religious communities have been some of the lowest acts of humanity.

While I’m not the clergy-person who might have caused you hurt, I would like to apologize on their behalf. Because, it seems, they owe you an apology—and at this time they are unable to give it to you.

We are all Americans – of all ethnicities, cultures, and political persuasions.  We won’t allow ourselves to be divided.  We stand up, speak out, and we vote for preserving our democracy through free and fair elections to express the will of our majority, so that we can secure liberty and justice for all.

I was not one who believed in a geographical expanse between Heaven and Earth. It all pretty much boiled down to the one moment we had right in front of us. The eternal now. The kingdom is within and all around you is the Biblical phrase I stood by.

Traditionally, religions offer a God who is omnipotent, all-powerful, almighty, the cosmic sovereign in control of everything.   He/she/it is also said to be all-knowing, omniscient, so he knows not only what he is doing but what everybody and everything else is going to do, and will do, from beginning to end.  This is brave belief of what God is.   But is this the sort of God we observe today?  

How do we allow for who we are now and allow for who others are as well. How do we remember to show the curiosity toward our friends that we need for others to show toward us. How do we not treat others as if they are the same, when of course they are not?

When I got the vaccine, I thought I’d want to run into the streets singing with joy like a giddy giant cicada. But in recent days, I’m struck by how anxious I feel – far more anxious than any time in the pandemic except at the very beginning.

Wisdom not much different than what St Benedict, a founder of Christian monasticism, observed about the contemplative life:  “Always we begin again.” Or what the 20th century Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote about prayer:  “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners.”
 

It is not something new to begin with cosmology—Genesis One does that.

The human immune system keeps us healthy and alive through violence against intruders who would do us harm. “Natural killers,” aptly named, are one type of cells in our immune system. Without the benefit of any prior exposure, they naturally seek out and destroy harmful cells. We rely on such violence within our bodies to be healthy.

Religious communities have a rich opportunity to contribute to a global goal of restoring forest ecosystems as part of the current UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Simply put, love is attention.  It is not complicated to pay attention to your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and urges.  It is not rocket science to stop, sit, and listen to another person who needs your time and focus. 

To those affected by the discovery of mass graves of First Nations’ children In Canada.

This week is Canada Day and July 4, two celebrations of national life in North America. Both holidays are particularly complicated – even painful – this year as citizens in both Canada and the United States struggle with legacies of colonialism and racism in history and our political lives.

In mystical activism, we live more and more in the divine flow of here and now, and experience the sacred world in everything we do – raising our children, loving our family and our friends, performing our work, being kind and considerate, caring for community and environment, pursuing climate activism, and even in the simplest human acts of eating and drinking and loving – they are all sacred in awakened consciousness.