This question – whether or not anyone can believe in God without reward – drives the work and witness of so many of my LGBTQ faith heroes who practice Christianity despite being rejected by and cut off from “the true Church.”
Churches, like public schools, face a ‘shortage’ crisis. Could this be an opportunity for both?
The American Church’s anxiety and desperation to survive – much like that of our nation’s reeling education system – frequently occludes its view of how to be helpful both to the world and to itself.
Jarrid Wilson’s suicide – and the urgency of pastors being free to be themselves
Who better than a pastor – called to live in a peculiar way on behalf of a group of people unable to live this way most days – to practice the art of prophetically being one’s authentic self, rather than attempting to be one’s best, most marketable self?
The President is right: Mental illness is killing all of us
Trump isn’t altogether wrong – gun deaths in America are driven by a mental health crisis. However, instead of that un-wellness resting upon a lone shooter or evil terrorist, it is visited upon all of us who still believe that the same circular conversation will actually result in something different.
Entitled Millennials aren’t killing the American Church; entitled churches are
When there are four year olds in jail at the border and the Arctic Circle hits 80 degrees, it’s time to find out why exactly the world needs the unending existence of our aging fellowship hall and sparsely-populated sanctuary. If we don’t know the answer, I’m not so sure Millennial church members are going to pull us out of that tailspin.
Finding an alternative to the anxious pursuit of happiness parading as American Christianity
Of the 25 to 30 students, adults, married couples and whole families I see each week in my practice as a psychotherapist, almost nothing is more difficult to overcome than our collective commitment to the anxious pursuit of happiness at all costs.
Listening to depression as a spiritual and political practice
The bad news that our world isn’t fine, that life is profoundly unfair, misaligned and wobbly and violently broken should tell us all something important about depression – namely, that depression isn’t wrong to declare life on earth uninhabitable; it’s just terribly misguided about what causes our maladies and exactly what solutions provide their remedy.
Contrary to the view of Triumphant Christianity, Easter is for failures
A Christianity that brings newness to deadness, even if the newness was something we would never have chosen for ourselves, is the sort of thing that just might blow the doors off the universe if we’ll let it. At the least, I know this kind of Christianity manages to empty my tomb year after year after year.
For my Methodist friends (and others): how to survive the death of your denominational home. Or not
My sisters and brothers in the Methodist tradition (and elsewhere), if you do have to leave your denominational home, I hope that you keep your eyes and ears open for a God you or your tradition can’t hold on to: a God at the bottom of the slippery slope, in a field Rumi famously described as one beyond right doing and wrong doing.