I never will forget my first psychedelic trip. Visions of Christ, my childhood and forgotten dreams flooded through my mind. When that river of thought slowed to a trickle, I sat on the edge of my bed and knew I…
Beyond Project 2025: MAGA populism’s religious plurality
The fears around Project 2025 were overblown by the Harris campaign, and that may be dangerous. In the 2024 election, talk of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was ubiquitous among liberal voters. Kamala Harris pressed Donald Trump on the issue…
Bartering in the Marketplace of Violence
Our words don’t matter anymore. There once was a time when they did. Media reach was limited by its medium, be that print or electronic, but with the advent of social media and the omnipresent internet, something changed. Anybody’s thoughts…
The Psychedelic Renaissance needs a Christian counterculture
The Psychedelic Renaissance has arrived. From Blue states like Oregon and Colorado to conservative stalwarts including Utah and Texas, bills to make psychedelics legally accessible are spreading quickly. Stereotypical drugs from 1960s and 1970s counterculture like magic mushrooms, mescaline and…
Is your church ready for the spiritual revolution of LSD, DMT and magic mushrooms?
At the end of my first year of divinity school in 2021, I took advantage of recent decriminalization laws and ingested between four and five grams of the Psilocybe cubensis, a naturally occurring psychedelic mushroom. For six hours, I clutched…
What an experiment with psychedelics 60 years ago might teach us about faith today
Sixty years ago, on Good Friday 1962, Civil Rights leader and minister Howard Thurman preached in Marsh Chapel on Boston University’s campus. Full of striking verbal imagery about Jesus’ suffering and God’s glory, his 85-minute sermon shook the otherwise silent…
Don’t let the Atlanta shooter off the hook by claiming women drove him to addiction
On the evening of March 16, Robert Long allegedly shot and killed eight people, seven of whom were women, at three separate massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Initial reports say he is a Christian and the son of…
Two years later, I still must say, ‘John Chau was my friend’
Sometime after the morning of Nov. 16, 2018, John Chau died on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. He had illegally attempted to perform missionary work among the Sentinelese, an uncontacted people group, and they killed him when he…