The Sixth Window:  Scottsdale, Arizona, December 13, 2011 When my mother died in 2010, my sister and I did a cursory cleaning out of her things.  We went through the dresser and closet and donated boxes of her clothes and shoes to charity.  The next year, however, was harder.  Her house was up for sale and we had to go through everything that remained. I was sorting through the back of the closet in her bedroom when I discovered an... Read more

The Fifth Window: Christmas Morning 1972 or 1973 The picture has lightened with time, fading like the memory attached to the scene.  There is no date stamped on the photograph, nor year scribbled on the back.  But the subject is still clear: a girl, thirteen or fourteen, in front of a Christmas tree holding a doll on her lap.  The girl is wearing a yellow t-shirt and plaid bell-bottoms, a smart and stylish teen-age outfit of those days.  She is... Read more

The Fourth Window:  Scottsdale, Arizona Christmas 1972 Christmas 1972 is the lost Christmas.  As hard as I try, I can’t remember anything about the holidays that particular year. In November, my family moved from Maryland to Arizona.  The highway voyage across the United States in the yellow Ford station wagon, dad and mom, the three of us children, and Old English sheepdog in tow endures in my memory—all the hotels, the changing landscape from east to west, the rest stops... Read more

The Third Window:  Early December 1968 A few weeks before Christmas, my mother pulled out a book.  Not just any book, this was the Sears holiday catalog called the Wish Book.  Every year, mom asked me, my brother and sister to go through the Wish Book and circle all the gifts and toys we wanted Santa to bring to our house.  For whatever reason, it never seemed odd to me that Santa shopped at Sears—everyone in our working-class neighborhood shopped... Read more

This year, I’m going to do something different for Advent.  Here, on my blog, I plan to open up a seasonal memory each day to reflect upon my own story, the people I’ve known and loved, many of who are no longer here.  I have no idea where this Advent journey will take me; nor do I know what this series of blogs will look like by the time I reach Christmas.  Whatever happens on the way, I invite you... Read more

This year, I’m going to do something different for Advent.  Here, on my blog, I plan to open up a seasonal memory each day to reflect upon my own story, the people I’ve known and loved, many of who are no longer here.  I have no idea where this Advent journey will take me; nor do I know what this series of blogs will look like by the time I reach Christmas.  Whatever happens on the way, I invite you... Read more

In the three months since my new book, Christianity After Religion, released many people have wanted to talk with me about “the end of church.”  But readers and interviewers seem more reluctant to talk about the other theme of my book: the possibility of awakening.  Not Welton Gaddy of Interfaith Alliance and State of Belief radio.  He goes to the heart of the matter.  Is there an awakening happening in faith and politics?  I argue that there is a new... Read more

The following is my Good Friday sermon for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Alexandria, Virginia, a town across the river from Washington, D.C., the seat of politics and power. * * * * * In the name of the Great God, the One who creates, redeems, and sustains the world. Around Good Friday 1373, an English woman laid a-bed, stricken by the plague, and facing what she thought would be her own death.  Much of her life is a mystery.  We... Read more

These are difficult days for faith in America.  On one hand, we are experiencing a Great Religious Recession, an end of conventional church; on the other, it seems that nostalgic, fundamentalist, and authoritarian forms of religion are on the rise. If those are the only options, we are all in trouble.  But, as I explore in my new book, Christianity After Religion, the hints of a new spiritual awakening are all around us.  This awakening, however, is rather different than... Read more

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day that we remember we come from the earth and shall return to the earth.  Everything is connected.  We live as part of creation, not above or separate from it. A blue grass song to help you embrace the day–and perhaps think about Ash Wednesday differently than you have in the past.  It isn’t just about personal sin and death, but a reminder that our lives are linked in love as part of God’s joyful... Read more