My good friend James A. Pearson wrote the following poem as the full weight of the pandemic came upon us. Even though we are now “coming out of it,” I think of how much we are still in the midst of it: the harsh and intense conversations around vaccination and epidemiology, the angst of stepping into packed bars, the “post-pandemic” economy, and – for me at least – the assumption that something similar will be coming again. And so, James’... Read more
For the past few years, there seems to be an every-present level of heightened anxiety within me. When I mention it to folks, they almost universally agree and share their own stories of this anxiety, be it COVID-related, stemming from White Supremacy, or something else entirely. Many folks I know are simply anxious – there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason: life is the reason. I feel a sense of this anxiety in my own body when I scan... Read more
(UPDATE: My book, Unmasking the Inner Critic: Lessons for Living an Unconstricted Life has now been released! You can check it out here.) A few years ago, I sat in a packed auditorium, surrounded by hundreds of others listening intently to a disheveled looking man speaking on the stage. His hair unkempt and his body bent as if permanently in the middle of a grateful bow, he sat in a wooden chair behind a small table with a singing bowl resting... Read more
There’s a big difference between taking a “course” and taking a “workshop.” A course is usually based in the head – intellectual, linear, and designed to take you from point A to point B in your understanding. If we’re honest, most education in the past hundred years has been a series of courses to prepare kids for the workforce. Churches operate with this very same mindset: pastors work from a curated lectionary and create “sermon series” to build on an... Read more
How can we create something remarkable? According to entrepreneur/freelancer/marketing genius Seth Godin, we create something worth making a remark about. Simple. Not easy, but simple. In other words, we create something that folks want to share – to talk about. (And hopefully in the positive way.) Experiencing the remarkable Think about something you’ve described as “remarkable.” Perhaps it was a book, a movie, an amazing song, or an experience. For me, it is the remarkable steak served at... Read more
When I became a teacher, I was trained in a pedagogy and a teaching style known as project-based learning. The idea is simple: people learn best through hands-on engagement rooted in real-world issues, so let’s create opportunities for that in school settings. If you were to walk into my classroom, you would see teams of high school students at work researching a local issue (such as gentrification), proposing small scale and large scale solutions, building prototypes for those solutions, and... Read more
For those of us who grew up in the Christian Church, our bodies were too often forgotten or ignored when it came to spirituality. Instead, spiritual matters were often presented like any other idea or topic, things to be cognitively believed or disbelieved. In some ways, it’s as if our bodies were seen simply as vehicles for our brains, ancillary to the search for spiritual depth. An embodied spirituality flips this paradigm, refusing to ignore that our experiences of the... Read more
What do we do with death? How do we process it, understand it, prepare for it, and sit in its presence? How do we learn from it and allow ourselves to be transformed by it? How do we learn to befriend it? Below is an interview with Kelsey Kappauf, one of my closest spiritual companions and a modern day death doula – if you don’t know what that is yet, don’t worry! You’re about to find out! Andrew: Kelsey, I’m... Read more
I sat in the room looking back and forth between my color-coded spreadsheet and my whiteboard leaning up against the wall. On the spreadsheet were dates, phases, plans, contacts, steps, and to-dos. Scrawled across the whiteboard were the big-picture elements: mission, vision, purpose, needs, desires, dreams. It was my latest idea, the way I would make an impact in the world: a physical space where art, mindfulness, and activism would come together, workshops being taught by some of the area’s... Read more
Where do you carry tension in your body? For as long as I can remember, my tension has been held in my upper back, my shoulders, and in my jaw. Whenever I feel antsy or out of control, my body tells me, much faster than my brain does, through the clenching up and aching of these muscles. It’s almost like my body waving this big flag telling me there’s something I need to pay attention to. In recent years, whenever... Read more
Becoming Faithful Questioners and Social Poets
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In