August 13, 2017

Words Said In Charlottesville Pride and Anger: Foundational Sins of the Alt White It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles . . . . what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles . For out of the mouth come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. – Jesus, according to Matthew (15: 11, 19) The... Read more

August 12, 2017

The Insidious Teaching of White Supremacy How It Is Cloaked in a Doctrine of Family Purity A true story – listen! My friend, a retired Episcopal priest from South Carolina, from an old Charleston family, from ante-bellum aristocracy, who horrified his family when he became an advocate for civil rights  back in the day, told me this story some years ago. It’s a story about Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General. He conceded defeat at Appomattox on a Sunday. And... Read more

August 7, 2017

Jesus Calms Storms, on Land and Sea But Big Money Is in Conflict and Disorder It’s some years now, more than a decade, maybe even two, since Hollywood decided there was more gold in action movies than anything else. So now the big money invests in blockbuster films. Many are about cartoon heroes: Batman, Superman, Wolverine, the X-Men, and all their super-power brothers, plus of course, Wonder Woman. And they are an endless source of gold, for they not only... Read more

August 2, 2017

The White House Writes Legislation for Immigration Change The White House Press Briefing hit a new low today, as Presidential staff writer Stephen Miller used snark and insults to drown out reporters’ questions and loudly talked over them, firing rhetorical questions from the repeating rifle of his mouth. The gist of this street fight which was supposed to be communication, was that the White House, in sympathy for angry and unemployed blue collar Americans, is intent on halving the number... Read more

July 30, 2017

Another Feeding of the Five Thousand The must-see movie of the moment is Dunkirk, named for the beach where 400,000 British soldiers were stranded as the Germans, advancing in unstoppable lines, pressed them from every side. Christopher Nolan, who directed the film, makes it personal by concentrating on individual stories of a few stranded soldiers, a man and his son in their fishing boat, an RAF pilot, and a Commander, who shared the eight days of waiting and rescuing that... Read more

July 23, 2017

Turning Your World Upside Down A pearl you spot in the window of a jewelry store. A box of money you unexpectedly find while digging around in the garden of a house you are renting. A packet of yeast and several bags of King Arthur flour you got on sale at Market Basket – all of these are things Jesus says best illustrate the reign of God. Not these things alone, of course, but these things with one or another... Read more

July 22, 2017

The Unkempt Fields of Weeds and Wheat Andrea Campbell, who teaches political science at MIT, has an article in the most recent Harvard Magazine, exploring  class –cluelessness, and using that title to describe the powerful resentments that are shaping American politics today, which is her subtitle. What she describes is uncannily close to Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat. The weeds and the wheat, though, are “them” and “us”. And who is “them” and who is “us” depends... Read more

July 15, 2017

The American Harvest Approaches A Reflection on Matthew 13: 24-43 We’ve moved so swiftly, in the Sunday readings, from sowing seeds last week to pulling weeds this coming Sunday. But it takes much longer, I want to say to no one in particular, because I do love to garden, but I no longer grow things from seed, haven’t done that since my childhood. My father, who loved gardening, would take me with him on an early spring day, to the... Read more

July 13, 2017

While the Senate Cuts Health Care Budget While the powers that be in Washington DC meet behind closed doors to argue over repealing and replacing the Affordable Health Care Act, here in New Hampshire a couple named Mike and Ann Sanok, who have a son, Alex, now 22, and severely autistic, have been going through health care hell. Alex, who is over 6 feet tall, has the mind of a 7 year old, his mother says, and for the past... Read more

July 11, 2017

What Trump said in Poland, and What It Means Gautam Mukunda , an American of Indian descent who teaches at Harvard Business School, reminded Jim Braude on the PBS Greater Boston show this evening of remarks White House Strategist Stephen Bannon made not long ago, remarks about Google and Microsoft employing mostly Indian computer geniuses. Bannon found this ‘culturally’ threatening, and lamented that preserving American ‘culture’ was not more important than creating global markets. Mukunda brought this up to make... Read more


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