Today’s post is longer than usual, but they truly are liberating words from the greatest prophet of our age. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of... Read more

Several years ago, journalist David Remnick wrote an article about President Obama and civil rights legend Congressman John Lewis who is the only surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington. He wrote: At the March on Washington, King’s speech was the most eloquent, Lewis’s the most radical. Lewis was just twenty-three at the time, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In the original draft of his speech, the demand for racial justice and “serious revolution” was so... Read more

On Friday, my partner, Ann and I decided to take the afternoon and go visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolence and Social Change. I am embarrassed to say that I have lived in Atlanta my entire life and have never visited this amazing place. The campus is split into a number of buildings.  As we walk from the parking lot to one of the main exhibit halls we passed these marble stone plaques built into the sidewalk... Read more

This past weekend I was working with a wonderful church in Jacksonville, Florida. In my sermon on Sunday, I talked about a small church that met on the west side of the city in the poorest section of town. Thirty years ago, that church was firebombed three times because its members were mostly lesbian and gay. Ultimately, they sold their property because the neighborhood just wasn’t safe and they had outgrown the space, but they couldn’t find a place to... Read more

An uncle once told me that college is the most fun you will ever have your life with no money.  This was true for me when I was getting my undergraduate degree from Georgia State University.  I loved my time at Georgia State, not just because I enjoyed the classes and as an English major got to read some of the most amazing works imaginable.  I enjoyed Georgia State most of all because my lunch hour. Walking to and from... Read more

Lesbian novelist Willa Cather said: Where there is great love, there are always miracles. Miracles explode where life is right and love makes life right. Miracles rest, not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming to us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is about us always. We all know that the rooms in which sit are filled with... Read more

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a monk who has devoted his life to tending the greatest library in Christendom murders other monks who learn the existence of a certain ancient book that disagrees with his attitude about God. The old monk is blind from decades as a scribe, but he fears this book might lead thinking Christians to question or examine what they always have been taught. Ironically, it is a book about laughter, and this pious... Read more

It frustrates me when people talk as if they understand and can explain God when we cannot even figure out the formula for our own lives. That doesn’t deter us from having absolute answers about eternal matters. I know people often leave my church disappointed. They come seeking answers, wanting us to give them explanations, expecting us to tell them everything they need to know about God, life, and eternity in less than an hour, and still have time for... Read more

I know that even asking this question will date me, but how many of you have ever owned a Rubik’s Cube? Now, be honest, how many of you ever solved one? I’m told that there are those who can solve the puzzle in less than a minute with only about 100 correct twists. That’s amazing, considering there are more than 43 quintillion (43,252,003,274,489,855,999) possible wrong turns. Compared to the number of possible wrong turns you can take with your life,... Read more

I love author Bailey White. She is from South Georgia and is frequent contributor to NPR. One of her stories from her book Mamma Makes Up Her Mind and other Dangers of Southern Living is about prayer: One rainy summer evening Sophie, my fundamentalist cousin, careened into our yard in her Volkswagen Beetle to tell us that there was a hurricane watch out for our whole county. She was excited. It might be the closest thing to Armageddon she would... Read more