Medieval European maps traced the outline of the entirety of past exploration, and just outside the bounds of what was known they inscribed the words, “Here Be Dragons.” Here Be Dragons is an appropriate mythological metaphor for the United States…
Vote, or don’t. The issues are larger than elections
Elections are but the end result of an advocacy for the common good that starts in each watershed. Imagine a different future, find collaborators and spend yourself extravagantly.
Bombs and balm
Recently declassified documents confirmed what many had long suspected, that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the 1976 assassination of former diplomat Orlando Letelier, along with his colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffit, in Washington, DC. This news is of especially personal…
On reading Malcolm X’s autobiography
Marking the 50th anniversary of its publication Malcolm X’s Autobiography was the first book that scared me. Here I was, in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, secretly abandoning my pietist-revivalist rearing in favor of the more verdant fields…
Dean Smith: A remembrance
I once preached in the Chapel Hill, N.C., church where legendary basketball coach Dean Smith was a member. Smith, who died this week, was not expected to be there that morning, since his University of Carolina team had a road…
Prettifying prophets
By Ken Sehested I have a vivid memory of that exact moment. I was in seminary, having fled my native South to Yankeedom to finish college and start theological training, embarrassed at being a Baptist, at being a white Southerner,…
The work of praise
By Ken Sehested The Blessed One does not stand in need of our praise; nor sits impatiently, impudently, awaiting our genuflection; nor strides restively, demandingly, threateningly, toward our cowering pose. No, none of this. There is no protection to be…
We say no, again
By Ken Sehested On the first Sunday in Lent in 2007, when tensions between the United States and Iran were escalating, Circle of Mercy Congregation unanimously adopted a statement opposing an attack on Iran. With the recent assassination of another…
The 20-year war in Iraq
By Ken Sehested I don’t know what it was that penetrated my groggy reading of the Sunday morning paper, sitting at the kitchen table, the coffee maker’s final perks hacking like a smoker’s cough. Something, subliminally, coming from the radio…