Here in the U.S., one of the stranger things in American history occurred this past November: the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the U.S. I say strange on a number of accounts: because Trump is an odd and peculiar character, and because his election took a confluence of events to line up. On one level, Trump is a bundle of contradictions: a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who appeals to populist values;... Read more

  A few weeks ago, I returned from a journey to Standing Rock, where three members (including myself) of the Brooklyn Center for Sacred Activism joined Oceti Sakowin for a few nights. But, I should tell you that I didn’t get back from a week of protesting and fighting for justice. I spent the week on a meditation retreat, a retreat during which I arose with the sun for morning prayers and walked in mindful prayer the rest of the... Read more

Elaine Pagels is perhaps the world’s leading scholar in the field of Gnosticism. In her luminous work, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Pagels details a provocative theory of an open conflict between the competing Gospels of John and Thomas that caused a fatal bifurcation in the early Christian community. She boldly argues that John “[wrote] his gospel to refute what Thomas teaches,” claiming that John may have in fact gone so far as to create the character of... Read more

Most of us have had the experience of being bowled over by something exquisitely vast and ungraspable. Awe can overwhelm us when we gaze at mountains, oceans, or the night sky. It can overtake us when we’re witnessing birth or death, or when we’re falling in love. It can surge through us as we consider the mere fact that we exist. I’m a Minnesotan, a theologian, and a pregnant woman. So for me, predictable awe-inducers include Lake Superior, God’s infinity,... Read more