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A Perspective on Queer Solidarity

Picture it: Rainbows. Everywhere. Rainbow balloons. Rainbow t-shirts. Rainbow flags. Rainbow signs. You feel the heavy humid air and smell the rainclouds preparing to unleash on the protest, yet there is joy and excitement filling the streets. It was Saturday, June 29th, 2019—Manila’s Pride Parade, and the LGBTQ community of Manila, Philippines came out in droves. With over 77,000 people marching through the streets, this celebration and protest became the largest celebration of LGBTQ individuals in Southeast Asia. Nestled in that mass of people was a group of theologically conservative, rural farmers,

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SETTING THE INNER COMPASS – National Poetry Month

Reading poetry is one of the ways some of us nourish our faith, a way we set or reset our inner compass and stay focused on the big picture, on the spiritual journey. I know that is true for me. This is the first anniversary of ‘Setting the Inner Compass’, a column where I share poems that I find meaningful and hope others do as well. Thank you to Lee Catoe for his work and support of this effort. April is National Poetry Month and the New York Times had two excellent pieces about the role poetry has played this past year. The first, Thank God for Poets (April 5, 2021) by Margaret Renkl, is about Amanda

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  • 4 Spiritual Practices for a More Just Lent

    4 mins read

    Justice work constitutes more than simply reading a book or declarations on social media. Thinking about the work of justice must be backed, when pondered by people of faith, by a spiritual renewal and transformation. Soul work is critical to the work of compassion, empathy, equity, and loving justice. The

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  • Unsettled by the Truth

    8 mins read

    Like millions of Americans who paid attention in seventh-grade Social Studies class, I was acculturated to believe that I descend from God-fearing people who came to the United States to live in an environment of religious tolerance and healthy capitalism. In the mid-19th century, my great-great-grandparents moved from eastern Germany

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  • The Cost of Reconciliation: A Message for White Christians

    15 mins read

    Reconciliation is at the heart of the Gospel—a core value and a central commandment we find woven throughout our sacred texts as Christians. The stories of Ishmael, Esau, Joseph, and other spiritual ancestors set the pace, and Jesus makes reconciliation central to the message of the Gospel. Jesus embodied reconciliation

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  • Take Another Route Home

    17 mins read

    We are now a few weeks past the violent insurrection and attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol. If you are like me, your social media and text messages started pinging early in the afternoon on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. Around 1:45 pm, I started getting frantic messages from friends and

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  • Martin Luther King: Message to Youth

    7 mins read

    In 1967, Canadian radio invited Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to give a series of lectures on the issues he considered most pressing at the time. One such issue was the world's place in the conscience and social responsibility of youth. This series of lectures was then

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  • 5 Ways to Rethink New Year’s Resolutions

    4 mins read

    2020 has been some kind of year. We have experienced a pandemic, racial injustice, environmental disasters, massive amounts of death, and political unrest. So the new year, 2021, is a welcoming sight in the distance that many in our world are finding hope within. But as the pandemic rages, specifically

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  • World AIDS Day 2020: Remembrance & Restoration

    14 mins read

    I spent the summer of 1994 being trained as a chaplain at the largest Level I trauma hospital in Atlanta. I was twenty-three when I began the program. At that point I had only peripherally met one person who I knew was HIV-positive, and I questioned if my life experience

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  • The (Im)Possibility of a White Christian Capacity for Intimacy

    13 mins read

    In tossing a coin, the possibility of either heads or tails remain equally viable options as the coin remains suspended in midair. In this moment, there is no way to be sure which way the coin will fall. However, the moment the coin lands on heads, the possibility of its

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  • Guns, Violence, & Trauma

    14 mins read

    Before I became the Gun Violence Prevention Ministry Coordinator with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, I volunteered as a restorative circle facilitator at an elementary school. This elementary school was located in an area with the highest level of childhood poverty in the state and the highest level of violence in

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  • Understanding Diversity in the Latin American Community

    5 mins read

    The Latin American community is not a single monolithic group; instead, it reflects the diversity of the continent’s colonization and is part of our past and present. Today in the United States, the Latin community demonstrates racial diversity and distinctive heritages. The native population is still strong with their traditions

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  • White Allyship

    11 mins read

    Many people have begun to head to the polls to vote. Some will wait until November 3rd to cast their votes. Today is a great time to talk about what it means to be an ally. Voting is one of the biggest ways people show their alliance and allyship. As

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  • Thoughts from Inside a Siege

    9 mins read

    I am not a radical. At least, I don’t think I am. What I am is a very mainstream pastor of a very mainstream Presbyterian congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. I know that there are many mainstream, non-radical people who are seeing news of the ongoing protests against racial injustice directed

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Abolition and the Cross: Reimagining Society and Salvation through Restorative Justice

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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Hallowed but not Sacred: An Epiphany of Capitol Violation

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 name of Trump, some 1000 or so extremists invaded and occupied the Senate and House chambers for several hours on January 6, prompting many Republicans and Democrats to refer to those sites as “sacred” spaces that had been desecrated by force and vandalism. For some, democracy may itself be sacred, by which they mean of highest value. The ritual of publicly counting the electoral votes from the states was thus a sworn duty that was interrupted. Such public ceremonies are

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