As a hospital chaplain, a colleague of mine recently shared the story of her experience administering the rite of baptism for a baby on the NICU, per the request of the family, prior to a planned terminal extubation. She discussed…
Savoring the ‘sacrament of the present moment,’ with a little help from The Decemberists
Christian thinking about the world we live in and God’s goals for it wrestles with a tension. What God envisions for the world is already being made manifest in the Easter reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and in…
Bearing resurrection
Stay up to date with the latest News & Events from The Alliance by Molly Brummett Wudel Here we are again: Eastertide. A time when Good Friday is consumed by Easter morning and the resurrected Jesus continues to bewilder the…
Religious liberty, Easter, and fear
I’m no legal expert when it comes to religious liberty. Not like Brent Walker or Holly Hollman. Neither am I a political pundit or a talking head who takes an extreme view in order to satisfy the base. I write…
Resurrection hurts
By Amy Butler In what must have been a slow news week, I saw a story last week about those iconic Easter candy chicks, Peeps. It seems that about 5 million Peeps are made each day in the months leading…
Surprise!
In the 1970s the British comedy troupe Monty Python performed a sketch which turned a common expression of exasperation at an unwanted series of questions into a comic refrain. In the sketch a man and woman are having a conversation….
What Easter means (and why what literally happened on Easter morning is irrelevant)
What matters most is not what historically happened on Easter morning to the body of Jesus but what the Easter story means. The Easter stories in the Gospels are religious/spiritual/theological stories, not historical reports. That is not to say there…
Exodus, exile and truly human resurrection: Living beyond tribalism and individualism
The beauty of the Bible has as much to do with what it tells us about human nature as it does to do with what it tells us about God. Indeed, the story of salvation only makes sense when we…
cynicism + the art of resurrection.
If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time (and once again, I recycle this joke only because it’s too good not to: thanks Mom!) you’ve likely at one point or another come to at least 2 conclusions about…