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Looking back and forward with eyes of grace.
It's that time of the year when we arbitrarily flip the calendar to a new year. This time we are also entering a new decade with what I hope is twenty-twenty vision - pun intended. As I look back on a decade fraught with emotionally eviscerating pain, I want to remind myself that there were …
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Mary started it: An Advent reflection
"Why are you making Jesus political?" "The social gospel proponents don't care about individual salvation, and that's what Jesus was all about." Interacting online is something that I do as a public theologian and I often see questions and statements like those above while perusing the internet. A major, if not THE major, theme of …
Once upon a time…An Advent reflection
Once upon a time... I was a bigot, brazenly proclaiming my bigotry towards God's beautiful and wholly beloved LGBTQIA rainbow children. Once upon a time... I was completely unaware of the racism I carried within me that sometimes came out of my mouth. Once upon a time... I had no concept of white privilege or …
Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus: An Advent reflection
When it comes to perusing Biblical scripture, genealogies hardly make for scintillating reading, but that's what we tucked into last Sunday night at Ember Faith Community in Lancaster, PA. To the uninitiated, genealogies can come across as tedious lists of difficult to pronounce names that at first glance do not hold any real theological importance. …
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Help Wanted: No penis required
There is a prevalent idea among many Christians, spurious though it is, that women cannot serve in church leadership as ministers, or to teach men in any capacity such as in a seminary class. To do so these folks claim is to ignore Biblical authority. In their view, the world is a sinful place filled …
Bible 101: What the Bible isn’t. Part One
In an earlier post, I wrote about what the Bible actually is because many people are truly confused about the Bible. They think that it is a single coherent narrative with a consistent theological view point despite the fact that it is really a disparate collection of writings that show a great variety of views. …
Strike!
Today all around the world people are striking for climate change because government's have been responding at a sloth like pace. A movement that began in large measure because of the persistence of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has become the face of the movement, has grown exponentially. I wholeheartedly thank her for standing in …
Incremental changes
In permaculture design, one of the principles is to make the least change for the greatest effect. One of the reasons to do this is to ensure that one doesn't overdo something--like I did while trimming my beard the other day which left me with some designer stubble rather than a full beard...Another reason, in …
The Tattooed Theologian 