This past Monday was Labor Day. In addition to enjoying a three-day weekend, it is important to be mindful that Labor Day is about much more than a last bit of time off at the symbolic end of summer. The first Monday in September is also an invitation to remember and celebrate the labor movement’s role in securing workers’ rights in this country. In the late nineteenth century, an increasing number of states officially recognized Labor Day as a holiday,... Read more

When I am researching a forthcoming blog post, I typically draw on books that have been published quite recently. Books that are more than a few years old too often have statistics that are out of date, or cite “current events” that no longer feel relevant. But occasionally I make exceptions for books that I just keep hearing about. An example from a few years ago is Dr. Kristen Neff’s book How to Practice Self-Compassion. It was published in 2011,... Read more

In February 2020, I received an invitation to help lead a tour of Israel and Palestine through a company that has an explicit mission of using the travel to increase social justice, peace, and freedom. One of their primary tools for doing that is the practice of “dual narratives.” This approach means that at many points on the trip you have both a Jewish Israeli guide and a Palestinian Arab guide who are in conversation with one another out of... Read more

Growing up in a theologically conservative congregation in South Carolina, I was taught that there was only one right way to be religious, and conveniently, it was ours. All other paths—including many other Christian paths—were said to be dangerous and heretical. But the more I learned about the world, the more evident it became that there are multiple spiritual paths that can lead to compassionate, wise, and generous ways of being in the world.  If we stopped here with just... Read more

We have been living through an extraordinarily hard time in world history, including years of threats to democracy in our country, an ongoing global pandemic, and on top of that, we’ve each had to face the various personal tragedies and family struggles that inevitably arise for each of us. Any one of those things is more than enough to deal with. Having to handle all of that for such a long period of time has put many of us in... Read more

There’s an old joke in Unitarian Universalist (UU) circles that if there’s one “St. John” whom the greatest number of UUs revere, it’s St. John Lennon. Seriously, it’s a whole thing far beyond UUs. There are St. John Lennon votive candles, stained glass windows, prayer cards, and more. Along these lines, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” is particularly beloved. And as I’ve been preparing this post, one line from that song has kept coming to mind: “Imagine there’s no countries /... Read more

I’ve read quite a few books about climate change over the past year, but I want to share some highlights from one book in particular. It’s titled Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America by Andreas Karelas, who is the executive director of RE-volv, a nonprofit organization that promotes a shift toward clean energy.  The basic gist of our situation, as summarized by one climate scientist is as... Read more

The stories we tell matter. The choices we make about which stories to teach our children matter. All the stories we tell and retell, year after year matter. Our choices about stories we allow to be neglected or suppressed matter as well. And regarding stories and perspectives most and least prominent in our culture, who decides and who benefits matter.   I bring all this up because May 31 and June 1 marked the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race... Read more

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Michael Eric Dyson, in his powerful book Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, devastatingly described the video of Floyd’s final minutes as “the most affecting murder by a cop that we have witnessed in the homemade cinema of Black death” (67). In response, along with many of you, I participated in what became “the largest and most sustained round of protests this country has seen since the... Read more

In early January I received a call from a nearby community college. They had a 15-week undergraduate World Religions course starting in a little more than three weeks that needed an instructor. Our first live Zoom class session was this past Wednesday, and our focal question was “What is religion?” I also added two crucial follow-up questions: “Who benefits?” and “Who decides?” You get very different answers to the question, “What is religion,” depending on whether you ask, for example, a fundamentalist... Read more