That’s when the name-badge on the chaplain’s neatly pressed shirt triggered a flashback to a conversation I’d shared with another chaplain some 20 years before. You see, this wasn’t my first stent in a psychiatric hospital, so much as a replay of a residential eating disorder program I'd undertaken my freshman year of college. I, a slightly obnoxious agnostic-anorexic endurance athlete at the time, came to appreciate visits from the resident chaplain, who would stop by to pray for the patients and entertain my philosophical ponderings.
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Yesterday I took the well-worn 2022 calendars off our dining room and kitchen wall and hung the brand new 2023 ones. I like calendars. In the kitchen we have one from Iona and another with amazing photographs of turtles. On the dining room wall is my favorite, a Kelly Latimore Icon Calendar. Her Icon for January is Thomas Merton. The images on all three calendars are beautiful. We still have one with great Central Park photographs but are not sure where we want to hang it. Hanging the new calendars is one of my rituals at the beginning of a new year.
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We are living amid an existential and devastating climate crisis, demanding a moral and theological response across global institutions. The urgency of this crisis has only escalated since fossil fuel divestment was first introduced at the General Assembly in 2014. At that time and in the years since, there is one thing that Fossil Free PCUSA (FFPCUSA) and the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) have agreed upon: the gravity of the crisis requires an urgent and robust response.
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I was recently at a book club facilitated by Abolition Apostles, a Christian abolitionist ministry, where we discussed the book The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition by Lee Griffon. Micah Herskind, a Public Policy Associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights and a Christian abolitionist, led that day’s session and said something that has stayed with me since. He was speaking about retributive justice and its connection to the Christian faith and said, “Do we believe in prisons because we believe in Hell or do we believe in Hell because we believe in prisons.”
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Moderate and progressive Christians have always found it hard to take Donald Trump seriously as a false messiah, much less an actual one. In the
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Our country is in the midst of twin pandemics. One, the coronavirus pandemic, is dominating headlines. The other is a nationwide spike in gun violence.
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