On a blazingly sunny January morning, I marched into a sanctuary outside of Denver, Colorado behind three huge paper maché puppets. They were elaborately fashioned, built on backpacks so they could be carried on the backs of their puppeteers: A brown skinned grandmother, two white braids and a kerchief, a coat hanger twisted into a pair of wire rimmed glasses on her kind face. A smiling mama, her cheeks pink and a bright red mouth up turned at the sides... Read more
I have fallen a bit behind. I had high hopes this year of completing the Thirty Days of Love activity calendar with my kids, filling our journal with words, our minds with thoughts, and our hearts with love. But, alas, we have fallen behind. Our ambitious expectations have been thwarted by dinner preparations and laundry and homework and basketball practice. Our journal is filled with many blank pages of good intentions. We have fallen behind, but we are still trying.... Read more
I grew up in the Pentecostal church. When I was ten, I knew just how the world would end: “the fire next time.” Tribulations. Seven seals. The four horsemen. Rainstorms of blood and fire. And what was more, this was coming any day now: the present terrible state of the world had been precisely prophesied in the book of Revelation in the bible. All you had to do was read it yourself. Polls indicate that roughly half of Americans are... Read more
This week, our kid’s favorite book-to-have-read-to-her is Lift Every Voice and Sing. Illustrated by Bryan Collier, the book creates a pictorial narrative for the words of the hymn written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900. It is not the lightest bedtime reading, for me—“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered”—but our Little Bean is very clear when she hands me the book... Read more
A couple of week’s ago, on a cold Chicago afternoon, after being cooped up for most of the week, my husband and I looked at each other and said, “Let’s go bowling.” Now, nothing says wholesome family fun quite like putting on some smelly communal shoes and listening to drunk men swear at the football game, but after being cooped up in the house for more of the week, we were just a little bit desperate. Matt and Jack have... Read more
As we conclude this month focused on beginnings, I am struck by the renewed interest in early childhood programs. In 1966, I began my career as a teacher in one of the very first Head Start day care centers, housed in the Plymouth Settlement House in Louisville KY. It was a quality program that changed the lives of the 3- and 4-year old children enrolled in our center. Those 45 children had an exciting learning environment, committed teachers, good food,... Read more
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality. First, a... Read more
For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in... Read more
I was taught in seminary to do ministry with sacred texts in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Our theological and ethical musings are of no consequence if they cannot be applied to what is happening outside the walls of our congregations, if they do not speak to people’s lives. As the Affordable Care Act comes into effect this month, I’d been wanting to do an in depth exploration of how our Unitarian Universalist values support the struggle... Read more
(Today, I preached at the ordination of a new minister in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism. Her name is Rev. Lara Campbell, and I shared the pulpit with Rev. Michael Tino. Here is my half of the sermon.) “Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,” wrote Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained by a denomination—the Universalists, in 1863. And we know that she did not demand immediate results,... Read more
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