Healing prayers and rituals are among the oldest traditions of humankind.  Even today, many congregations offer special healing services, often reclaiming the ancient practices of anointing and laying on of hands.  We are only beginning to …

  Saying grace before a meal offers us all a chance to pause for a moment of gratitude in our busy days.  Grace can be as simple as a silent blessing or as participative as going around …

In finding the version of the Lord’s Prayer that works for you or your church, there are many possibilities. You

Perhaps no prayer is more beloved of Christians everywhere than the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes called the Prayer of Jesus. While many of us still use the words as found in Matthew 6:9-13, it is an irresistible urge to recreate this most fundamental of prayers in modern language.

“In the beginning was the Word…” Words are both our means of communication and the source of most of our misunderstandings. Whether you are a rational scholar or a metaphorical poet, words are the common currency.

  Compassion is the cornerstone of every faith tradition.  The movement out of yourself, to the point of being concerned with the sufferings of another, is the beginning of the movement toward God.  As the Dalai Lama …

  We celebrate the Fourth of July and we say God Bless America and we struggle to guide our nation to act responsibly towards its citizens and towards the other nations of the world.   But remembering …

  “Every religion gives its prescription for bringing sacred into daily life. The Native Americans have as one of their most noble ideals that we learn to walk on the Earth in a sacred manner. Yet vast …

  We take time each year to honor and appreciate the fathers in our lives.  Just as we have expanded our metaphors for God beyond the traditional “God the Father” so we have broadened our understanding of …

  Midsummer… summer solstice… longest day of the year… our celebration of the earth, abundance and light at this time of year has ancient origins in many cultures’ spirituality.  We reaffirm our connection to the earth and …

Weddings have become in many cases amazingly elaborate productions.

“In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.” Gandhi

In this season of graduations, we celebrate the learning that continues on past school…

  Once something we took for granted, created in our towns or schools or churches, community is becoming increasingly precious.  Social media give us new forms of community but without the in-person element.  My computer has yet …

If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she
gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is
better at arithmetic, you or your mother?

“Diversity is inevitable. Pluralism is an achievement.” We sometimes use these words — diversity and pluralism — as if they meant the same thing.

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures

There are places in the world that hold a special energy. You can feel it when you go there.

Some of the best advice I ever got from my spiritual director was to read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. “This will change how you think about Jesus,” she said.

You can’t get to Easter without going through Good Friday.

Poetry and religion seem to go together: two approaches to the challenge of trying to capture the ineffable in words.

New music telling the ancient story can bring that story alive in our own time.

We’ve heard the story of Holy Week so many times that we’ve come to think there couldn’t possibly be another way to tell it.

“Preaching, teaching and healing” is the usual description of Jesus’ ministry.

Whatever your own stance is on interpreting the Bible, there’s no denying its place as a foundational source of literary references in our culture.

“God is a verb” — one of those phrases that occurs independently to different people and then keeps showing up.

To listen attentively is a great gift. It is more than just being quiet (or, as author Simon Sinek puts it, “There is a difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak.”).

There is an old, old story told in many cultures that goes something like this:

Beginnings and endings are so connected… every beginning will eventually have an ending, and every ending makes possible a new beginning.

Grief comes in all sizes, because loss comes in all sizes. Small sadnesses happen every day, and we mark them and move on. Intense sadness comes to everyone eventually, and we struggle not to be overwhelmed by it.

Metanoia is a word worth learning. The Greek means literally “change your understanding” or “think differently.” In our modern parlance we might say, “Awaken!”

Progressive Christianity lost one of its giants last week with the death of Marcus Borg. His books and lectures opened up the academic world of historical Jesus studies to the rest of us, and we will be forever in his debt.

Audacious prayer is the cry of the heart. Mahatma Gandhi once wrote, “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

In one sense, New Year’s Day is no different than any other day. After all, the calendar we live by is a human construction.

Christmas Eve is the culmination of the anticipation and preparation of Advent. This is what we have been waiting for and now it is here. Traditions – whatever yours are – hold comfort and connection. For a little while, our world keeps a different kind of time.

Reflecting on the birth of Jesus in poetry gives us yet another way to approach and assimilate this event. Birth is always a miraculous occurrence, and this birth even more so.