“Gone to the fields to be lovely. Be back when I’m through blooming.” From the poem Camas Lilies by Lynn Unger As a general rule, I believe in attempting to live out of a mentality of abundance over scarcity. However,…
We need a new set of metrics for the spiritual life
I recently found this photo of my mom standing with my sisters and me on an Easter Sunday morning around 1964. Aside from my stunning fashion statement, I want to point out the Bible firmly grasped in my right hand….
A lesson from Sister Meg on celibacy helped me understand white supremacy
No one, not even church folk, like talking about celibacy let alone white supremacy. Celibacy and white supremacy — like sexuality and skin color — are two preferably avoidable conversations. Perhaps these conversations are sidestepped because they invoke images that…
Hope in ritual: A Baptist prays the Daily Office
The Daily Office takes out that deciding factor of what to pray, how to pray, when to pray and allows me to go through the entirety of scripture, even the parts I’d rather forget were there.
Addicted to spiritual highs? Try calming the soul, experts say
By Jeff Brumley People who hop from church to church in search of more exciting worship or who seek constantly to feel the intensity of God’s presence in their lives very likely are addicts, Jeanie Miley says. For them, religion…
Prayer could be performance enhancing. So should it be banned in sports?
By Jeff Brumley One standard the World Anti-Doping Agency uses to ban a substance is whether it enhances, or has the potential to enhance, athletic performance. Drugs aren’t alone in such scrutiny. The use of high-tech prosthetic limbs has caused…
Givenness
By Scott Dickison Marilynne Robinson, the gifted writer, novelist and Christian apologist, argues in her new collection of essays that for all our modern questioning and search for meaning we often fail to appreciate the “givenness of things.” I’m taken…
Sometimes it’s just a matter of showing up
By Jayne Davis It was really such a simple plan. The group would meet at my house at 4:30 for coffee and dessert and then head off together to the nursing home at 6 to sing Christmas carols for residents…
Locating your door
By Molly T. Marshall I have invested time this summer reading David Brooks’ fine book, The Road to Character. He did not write it quickly — nearly seven years in the making — and in it he contrasts two forms…