A pastoral letter to the United Methodist Church: My people are meeting with their people and all of those people are God’s people. The United Methodist Church’s General Conference is being held this week in Tampa, FL and lay and clergy delegates of many stripes and persuasions are engaging in “holy conferencing”– and unfortunately of a lot of realpolitiking too. The delegates were elected to represent United Methodists in each of the “Annual Conferences” (regions of the country and the... Read more

In yo face Devil! Take that forces of evil! Look whose laughing now! Ding Dong the witch is dead! We fart in your general direction! Sike! … Such has become the way that many of the world’s Christians have come to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection on Easter. We’ve allowed the ways of the world to infuse our beliefs and we end up fighting fire with fire. Employing the world’s ways against it. Once our religion became the official religion of the... Read more

A Progressive Easter Sermon This world is a tough place to live. And parts of it are really tough. Places like Antarctica with it’s frigid cold; the top of mountains with their thin air; desserts with their lack of water and vegetation; the oceans with their tidal waves, hurricanes, etc. – places like these are pretty inhospitable to humans. But it’s not just these sorts of extreme places that are hard to live in. The regular parts of the world... Read more

You may’ve noticed something yesterday. That is, if you weren’t too busy to notice. If you weren’t too busy cocooning yourself off from the rest of the world by texting while you were driving, or walking along the sidewalks looking down at a little screen on your phone. Or if you weren’t so overly cloistered among an obscenely small clique of like-minded, like bodied, hyper-allergenic, hyper-feng-shuied chums.   What you may’ve noticed is dust.   More specifically, ashes. You may’ve noticed some... Read more

(This piece was originally posted in March, 2011, but is now even more relevant in light of the recent Occupy Wall Street protests) *** Notice: a revised, and much improved, version of this article has been published on 3/3/14.  Here’s the link <– click *** ====== Mardi Gras.  Fat Tuesday.  Shrove Tuesday. The day before Ash Wednesday.  A day for living with passion, vim and vigor, and for zealously sucking the marrow out of life.  It’s also a day when... Read more

[Note: This blog was written on April 3, 2011, the anniversary of the night before MLK’s assassination.] On this night in 1968, MLK delivered his last speech.  He was shot and killed the next day. These are words that haunt, inspire, challenge, and motivate me. I see signs of this kind of radical Christianity, this kind of critical patriotism, and this kind of unabashed spiritual boldness in various places around the world, but not so much in the country I... Read more

The clocks are ticking and 2011 is about to end and it’s about to be 2012. For some, this is a big deal. A lot of people, from various walks of life, think that something big is about to happen. In the past year, a fundamentalist Christian radio personality name Harold Camping got not one, but two, 15 minutes of fame for casting predictions that the world would end in 2011 – and a lot of his followers maxed out their... Read more

Progressive people know not to put money into the red Salvation Army kettles around Christmas. Even though that organization (Church) does a lot of good and helps a lot of people, they’re perceived as homophobic bigots who won’t allow homosexuals the right to join their ranks or participate in their reindeer games. A recent article on Elephant Journal spells this out in detail: …From the Salvation Army website, they list their positional stances on many topics, including homosexuality: The Salvation Army... Read more