Last week I was invited to be the community speaker for the local high school Baccalaureate. It was an honor but also challenging. How do you speak to high school students and to a community from such diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds? Bainbridge Island is a classic upper middle class, educated, privileged, white community. This sets off all the usual alarm bells, “Hm… they don’t have any real problems.” And, of course, these kinds of prejudice may have a grain... Read more

The Last Acceptable Prejudice hit a chord, not only with religiously conservative folks but with liberals who balk at the notion that we should give religious conservatives any hearing at all. Like so much in our culture we seek enemies and enjoy destroying them, and so we are at loggerheads on religion. The New Atheists, buoyed by a new sense of confidence and numbers, are feeling their oats and will not be silenced, and I say rightfully so. Liberals, whether... Read more

I don’t often go to campus talks at my university. I don’t go because if I attended all those that interest me I would never get my work done. But I made an exception for Dr. Eboo Patel. He was named by US News & World Report as one of America’s Best Leaders of 2009. He is the Founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a Chicago-based organization building the interfaith movement on college campuses. He served on President... Read more

Around the time that Bruce Lee reached the height of his Hong Kong cinematic career, a few Asian American writers put together an anthology called Aiiieeeee! (1973). I grant that readers who know what they’re talking about will gently protest that this collection has been contested by feminist and queer API writers for leaving out women’s and non-heteronormative Asian American experiences (for details, read David Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America). I’m using the anthology to make one... Read more

My post-doc, Justin K.H. Tse, is guest posting for me this week, sharing his fascinating thoughts on Asian American religion which will be featured on these next several posts. I’d like to thank Jim Wellman for letting me guest post on his American Religion blog during this Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Inaugurated in 1977 by Representatives Frank Horton (R-NY) and Norman Mineta (D-CA) and Senators Dan Inouye (D-HI) and Spark Matsunaga (D-HI) as Asian/Pacific Heritage Week, President George H.W.... Read more

I wish I read Jeff Keuss’s brilliant book, Blur: A New Paradigm for Understanding Youth Culture, when I was a young youth minister. In many ways, I intuited many of his conclusions out of my own experience, but I felt alone. Like many I heard that youth ministry was about converting kids and making them disciples of Jesus Christ. Moreover, that one had to be certain in one’s faith and follow whatever the hippest method to come out of Youth... Read more

I suppose I can be accused of being biased on the Super Bowl. I live in Seattle. I’m rooting for the Seattle Seahawks to win the Super Bowl. So be it. I have, however, tried to think about this grand national pastime and wonder, on occasion, should I participate in it? Shouldn’t the violence, so typical of an NFL game, be a kind of rebuke to my enjoyment of this game? More to the point, why is an NFL football... Read more

I wrote a book on Rob Bell, and for many reasons, its been a blessing to me. But one of the unexpected blessings was that he became my friend. Now, with Rob’s new interview with Oprah, there may be a sense in which some might say, “He can’t be for real. He’s gone Hollywood. Now he’s really full of himself.” Well, let me tell you a story of a friend of mine. Some know that my wife passed away two... Read more

“Oh… it’s gonna to be hard to say goodbye.” My wife quoted to me Dorothy’s farewell to her comrades, just days before she passed. And there are no words to describe the hole I feel at her passing.  My extraordinary wife, partner and dear friend passed after a 22-month struggle with a rare tumor recently. The tributes that have come in have taught me again who she was in this life: A beacon of light to many, an in-spiriting source... Read more

It’s a fascinating time in American history, religion and politics. I recently wrote that it’s time for my liberal and moderate friends “to get hard.” I made the case that in fact, because of our inattention and our tendency to compromise that we have lost on nearly every social and political agenda of importance: increasing social inequality; larger military budgets; more weapons on the street; a stalled immigration reform; endless money in our politics, and now, with one piece of... Read more