Last Friday night I went to my seminary Alma mater to discuss my recently published book Go Golden with the students in an ethics class. It was humbling to sit there, in a classroom I had spent many hours in as a seminary student pursuing a M.A. in religion, with a room full of students who had …
Tag: religion
Embracing diversity New Testament style
In my last post, I posited the argument that God loves diversity and based that statement on the obvious abundance of diversity found throughout the natural world. To me that abundance means we should not only accept people in the LGBTQIA community, we should recognize that they were born exactly as they were supposed to …
There’s something happening here: The sequel
If you close your eyes and think about church you may get a flood of images of steeples, pews, and a choir, or of clergy members in various types of garments that denote their office and role. Perhaps you will feel emotions, be they positive because your experience with church has been largely positive. Conversely, …
Continue reading There’s something happening here: The sequel
Dr. King and intersectionality
Books have the power to profoundly impact our lives. In 2006, I found an audiobook copy of A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. at my local library. I had some familiarity with King's work prior to listening to that book, and his autobiography in quick succession, but not much. Those two …
2019: Year of self care
The calendar has flipped to a new year. Despite the somewhat arbitrary nature of the Gregorian calendar, starting the new year on the winter solstice makes more sense to me, we are now at the beginning of a new year, where a new you is possible and everything seems to be new, new, new...As human …
Calling Christians to care for creation: A synopsis of Go Golden
In the Biblical story of the Earth’s creation, we are told that God created it and all of its inhabitants, proclaiming each and every aspect of this creation to be “Good.” To my mind this would make God the ultimate biological systems engineer, the premier Permaculture designer of all time. Every type of life that …
Continue reading Calling Christians to care for creation: A synopsis of Go Golden
Traumatic Episodes: A sneak peek
The following is an excerpt from the manuscript I am working on entitled Traumatic Episodes: Finding Grace in a Life Lived with PTSD. It's very much a work in progress. There will be journal-like entries (as with the one below) along with narrative chapters covering different time periods in my life. (Petros the Stress Demon is my …
Climate Change: Our tremendous opportunity
This is a post previously published on my other blog in October 2018. Permaculture and theology are intertwined for me and creating community is a theological concern hence my re-posting it here. The mainstream media is finally getting the message on global climate change as the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel …
There’s something happening here…
Around three years ago, I attended church for the first time in a many years. Prior to that I had rejected the fundamentalism of my youth and as a result ended up spiritually adrift for a long time. When I left the church in 2003, for more details see my forthcoming book from Wipf …
Oppression in Jesus’ name
One of the things that gets me riled up is the conflation of things done in the name of a religion by fundamentalists with the actual teachings of said religion. Case in point, America in 2018 is being enthralled, in the most negative sense of that word, by fundamentalist "Christians" who are gleefully celebrating every …