I was just briefly engaged in a a Facebook exchange with an old friend, in which I spoke of “eating other people’s karma” as a marker of how radically interdependent we all are. My friend in passing alluded to that phrase as “karmaphagey” a neologism akin to the Christian term theopagy, “eating the god,” as a reference to communion. In fact the very association of the two terms is significant for me, because in a sense when we eat someone... Read more

Harvey Milk was born on this day in 1930. (After posting this simple notice, a Facebook friend pointed out that the US Post Office is issuing a stamp in his honor, today!) Read more

There are a ton of saints in the Roman & Orthodox calendars. The Anglicans have stripped their calendar down dramatically, although they’ve been enriching it in very interesting ways over the last couple of hundred years… Sometimes one has to wonder what goes into the decision making process. For instance, the recent hubbub about the rush to make a couple of popes saints, one looking a whole lot like a tip of the hat to contemporary “liberal” Catholics, the other... Read more

The really wonderful folk at Wikipedia figure that it was today in 325 that the bloody handed tyrant Constantine pulled together enough bishops to create a council to drive through the church he wanted to see. He got it. They could have done a better job. Now I freely admit if I had those heavily armed soldiers there to “protect” me, I can’t say I would have done it. (Truth in commenting: I’m not one of those who fantasize that... Read more

It is quite common these days among my ministerial colleagues of various theological flavors to disparage, denounce, and mock the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” I get the objection. It can be the easy way out, allowing one to claim all the good things about religion and spirituality without having to deal with the yucky bits of organized religions. And no doubt there is something about a real challenge to engage the tradition, to deal with the parts that are... Read more

Theodore Parker is without a doubt one of my favorite ancestors on the Unitarian side of my spiritual inheritance. Not very popular among his colleagues in his day, I admit I may not have liked him as a person, either. But, my goodness, where he stood and how is a witness before the world. The famous arc of history line paraphrased by both Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama was his, first. Quoting Wikipedia’s quote of the historian John... Read more

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! By some calculations the Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, poet and Sufi Omar Khayyam was born on this day in 1131. In my youth I was very much taken with what I only later learned was Edward FitzGerald’s controversial loose translation of parts of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Later, when I was... Read more

It was on this day in 1337 that the woman we know as Julian of Norwich recovered from an uncertain but terrible illness and with it concluded her experience of a series of visions of Jesus. Certainly a fascinating figure. A person about whom we know next to nothing, not even her name. About all we are sure of is that she lived for years as an anchorite, a solitary monastic, living at the church of St Julian in Norwich,... Read more

A million years ago when I returned to school to obtain the undergraduate degree that would allow me to enter seminary I was in a great rush. I tested out at every opportunity and in general did not see any sort of formation in my undergraduate experience. As someone in their late thirties, I pretty much felt my true alma mater were the various used and antiquarian bookstores in which I had worked for the previous twenty years. Still think... Read more

A MOTHER’S DAY MEDITATION James Ishmael Ford 11 May 2014 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island While preparing for this homily, for those of us not up on preacher lingo, a homily is a short sermon, I ran across a poem by Rhona McAdam, The Boston School of Cooking Cookbook. Here’s how it goes: “This is my mother’s cookbook, its spine loose/with age, the fabric bare of colour at the seams/and weak, so it must be held tenderly, the way/my... Read more