Someday, they say, stars will stop gelling—the hydrogen and helium gone. Someday, each star will call it a day & go to bits. Someday the day will be as dark as night, the hydrogen, the helium snuffed. Someday, in, oh, say, ten billion billion years, time will eddy & stop. Someday deep will call to deep with nothing here at all. Someday here will be empty like there, in, oh, say ten billion billion... Read more
Apparently it is all the rage these days for state legislatures to introduce “religious freedom” bills that would allow people to refuse to do business with someone if it would go against their sincerely held religious beliefs. Clearly we are to understand these bills as a means for people who disapprove of same-sex weddings to not have to provide services for those weddings. On the one hand, this seems like not such a big deal. Who really wants an appalled... Read more
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…” The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year. Beloveds, we are going... Read more
I had a great time visiting New York City this past weekend. A couple years ago, I would not have expected to enjoy “The City” ever again. You see, I called New York home for five years. And by the time we prepared to move out of the city, I was pretty overwhelmed by that amazing, infuriating, beautiful, exhausting island. For the first four years we lived there, I tamped down my frustration, my fear, my overwhelm. But when we made the decision... Read more
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” – Kurt Vonnegut In college, we had this mantra among our swim team: hard core. As the phrase might imply, to be hard core meant maintaining physical and emotional strength in spite of pain and... Read more
I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this: I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other... Read more
“By not finding Dunn guilty of murder, the jury could not unanimously conclude that one white man’s imagination was worth more than one black teen’s life.” -Aura Bogado, Jordan Davis: What We’ve Come to Expect, http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/02/what_weve_come_to_expect.html “Colorlines publisher and executive director of Race Forward, Rinku Sen, was a guest on the Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the dimensions of the Michael Dunn case on Sunday. “What Michael Dunn expected from that interaction was not respect but submission,” she said... Read more
I tend to get it from both sides when I talk about spiritual practice: many of my fellow skeptics blanch at the word “spiritual.” And many Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sufis, and what-have-yous seem to think that rationality and spiritual practice are at loggerheads. But humanists value connectedness and experience wonder just like everyone else. As far as I’m concerned, that’s spirituality. I grew up Pentecostal. The spiritual practices taught in that tradition are daily bible reading and prayer. There is... Read more
I could be wrong, but I rather suspect that Valentine’s Day is the most widely despised holiday in the country. Really, unless you’re in the small minority of people who are in the throes of romantic passion, what’s to like? You don’t get a day off of work, there’s no religious ceremony or significance, and for weeks ahead of time the stores are filled with a boatload of pink and red crap that nobody needs, and hardly anybody actually wants.... Read more
This winter has devastated my sub-tropical garden in New Orleans. I was out of town when the last polar vortex dipped down for a visit. In my absence, all of the plants that I had brought into the house during the first big freeze were left outside to melt into gelatinous puddles. The joyful exception to the sad stories in my garden is the camellia. And I am not the only one who is excited about the flowers. The honey... Read more
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