In worship at Mt Hollywood Church in LA, Sunday, Feb 16, I “channeled” William Jennings Bryan, best known as the fundamentalist Christian lawyer who defended six-day creationism in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.

The traumas visited upon Black bodies for the past 400 years have included physical violence and theft of spirituality, which is linked to today’s mental and spiritual wounds, passed down from generation to generation.

A film by John Feldman
147 minutes | English SDH Captions
The film is divided into ten essays. Each essay may be played individually or you can play them in blocks. We suggest playing the 3-minute Introduction before playing an individual essay, or blocks.

I am a Christian.
Actually, it’s more accurate lately to say that I am still a Christian.

An assembly of words that have the power of a hammer and the tenderness of a hug. A little book that tells a big story of a soul’s journey through religion to the Light.

From cradle to coffin we live out our time
We ponder existence seeking reason and rhyme

It seems like falling in love and staying in love should be easy. However, clearly, it is one of the most difficult things that almost everyone wants to do. At least a part of the problem rests with an out of date conception of what marriage must or should be, coupled with fears rooted in our earliest years and our connection to our parents.

PATHWAYS Theological Education, Inc., is a Progressive Christian learning community seeking to empower transformative leadership for justice and peace within and beyond the church by engaging heart and mind to consider what it means to know, love and serve God in today’s changing world. 

“Unbinding Christianity” is a book that will be good news for some readers while stretching others in uncomfortable ways. It begins with the premise that traditional Christian teaching is focused on right beliefs while the life and teachings of Jesus was all about right living.

“What do you mean when you say, ‘progressive christianity?'” I am often asked this question and so rather than a sermon, this Sunday’s reflection explores the contours of our journey as we wrestle with the MYSTERY that is our SOURCE.

Thurber Lectures
Thurber Conversation & Guest Preacher — Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis at The American Church in Paris

Students – and everyone else – are thirsty for non-transactional connections.  They crave real friendships that are grounded in unconditional agape love. 

Prayer invites us to quiet our spirits,
to quell the distractions that otherwise avert our attention
from virtues to banalities of existence.

I have often heard from many people that if you just accept Jesus as your savior then you will be alright. Right? Of course Right? I don’t believe so because as far as I know God or Spirit is everywhere present.

“Black lives matter” is not just wisdom for protesting “issues” of law enforcement. It should be a mantra for all of life.

Archibald MacLeish wrote, “Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.” We progressives generally agree with allowing faith to be personal and resist making any one religion’s beliefs a matter of public policy.

The Unity Flag was first flown by College Park Baptist Church at the FaithAction Unity Walk in Greensboro, NC on August 5, 2017 and symbolizes a commitment to basic human and civil rights for all people.

I have to deduce that even though it all started with the big bang, expanded, and distributed its matter across the universe, it also exists as a single unified and inseparable whole. We are all star-stuff. We are all inextricably connected. The Divine in me can see the Divine in you. When I see you, I see me.

First of all, applying the book of Revelation (BOR) to current events is nothing short of spectacular speculation and hindsight. But, it is amazing that it fits so well in our current time.

  As progressive Christianity continues to emerge and evolve, it is important to seek clarity on the vision of Christian faith it calls us to.  The word progressive bears significance.  A progressive faith is an evolving faith, …

Tell your drama and listen to others. Teach each other to to live out loud. Be a drama addict with me and we will heal, living what is real – in service to all. We will each spring forth, being wonderfully dramatic, writing renewed lives filled with sheer joy and light.

  As I write, the State of the Union is just about to begin, results from the Iowa caucuses are finally coming in, and the Senate prepares to vote on impeachment. And it is only February. What …

My question is, isn’t it time here in the 21st century to begin to create new ways of thinking and the full acceptance of the reality in which we live?

Wow! To me the events of the last 24 hours feel like The Empire Strikes Back. It feels like evil is kicking our butts, defying the dream of democracy.

Finding peace through social justice.

“Truth matters. Truth matters. If truth doesn’t matter, we are lost. We are lost.”

And so, the obvious question is this: If truth matters – above and beyond the facts of the matter – what is truth?

Thinking religious words have become widely separated from any meaning in religious practice isn’t that new. It’s mostly fundamentalists, including atheist ones, who are still sticking to either/or, black/white concepts.

Throughout history, humans have believed that deceased loved ones, ancestors, spirit guides, angels, and other helpful spiritual beings operate in our lives and are genuinely interested in our welfare. Notwithstanding the advent of scientific materialism, such beliefs are also alive and well today.

In 2018, the evangelical scholar Walter Brueggemann boldly departed from the twin evils of American Christian Evangelicals – fawning approval and cowardly silence about the evils of privilege and oppression that have resulted in “our socio-political circumstance.”

One of the struggles many millennials have with organized religion in general is the inability of the older generations to adapt, change, or entertain new ideas and new ways of thinking. This is an issue each generation bumps up against, but this generation and this subject don’t seem to be finding a middle ground.

We’re sorry that the world is such a terrible place. We’re sorry that the earth herself is groaning under the weight of our filth. We’re sorry that billionaires rule the world. We’re sorry that my consumption enslaves others in poverty. We’re sorry that justice is so difficult to come by for the poor. We’re sorry, I’m sorry, You’re sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. What do you want from us?

Watch this video as the United Church of Christ’s quarterly medical debt forgiveness campaign continued in St Louis over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Twelve St. Louis and Missouri Mid-South Conference congregations and the Deaconess Foundation joined forces to come up with over $100,000 in donations.

The words apocalypse and eschaton have been resurrected from the dustbin of theological jargon, and they both refer to what happens at the end of time. More specifically, they point to the end of life as we know it, and today that prophecy comes in two forms.

The late Ayn Rand was a powerful figure in the rise of American neo-liberalism. She was instrumental in the formation of the Reagan approach to the capitalist system, so defined as a system that gives full reign to markets without government interference.

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. In fact, faith based on rational evidence has been a part of the study of theology for hundreds of years. This sermon discusses the use of logic in philosophy in the study of probability, and references Bayes’ Theorem, (Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister!) as we apply critical thinking to our religious beliefs.

In this groundbreaking book Fox presents sides to Thomas Aquinas that have never been seen before. The series of four “conversations,” are based on the four paths of creation spirituality. Fox translates many works that have never before been translated into English, French or German.