Month: January 2019

This weekend I was searching through articles and websites for material for an ongoing feature on women I suggested for our church bulletin during Women’s History Month this March. (Funny thing about suggesting: you suddenly become the “volunteer” to put it all together! I really didn’t mind though because I had wanted this kind of…
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I’m sitting at the end of my friend’s bed in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates (just outside its more famous sister city, Dubai). I’m on my winter break from divinity school and another friend and I have flown here to visit Bushra, one of our best friends from college. We hadn’t seen…
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Envisioning, imagining what Church could be in an age in which we desperately need the wisdom and insight of new inclusive leadership and ministry, including our own, I came upon this article called Quest for the Sacred: Walk in the Church of the Woods by Meggen Watt Petersen. She describes a church in New Hampshire…
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I have wanted to write about seminaries for a long time, but there always seems to be something else. Then this week, NCR announced a series to answer these questions: “How are priests being formed? Who is teaching them? How are seminaries adapting to the new wave of abuse crises and condemnation of clericalism from…
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I’m not very good at the contemplative “time-out” in life. I’ve tried but have never been able to meditate in any frequent or ordered way. I want action, I say to myself. I want us to get out there and work for justice, march for peace, witness for inclusion and equality, not just sit around…
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Last week, I could not cope with Pope Francis’s letter to the United States bishops as they began a weeklong retreat in Chicago. Why did he think they should pray together because of a “crisis of credibility”? To repent of the sin of disunity, as I read it. This is vastly different from repenting for…
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How rich the Church would be if only the blessed gifts outlined by poet, Jan Richardson below – and so many, many more that you could name – from all genders – were permitted. I’m not telling you here anything you don’t already know, but sometimes, I think, in this week of the celebration of…
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“Peace on the earth, good will to all.” Is that what you are singing as this Christmas season comes to a close? My intentional Eucharistic community thought that we were so revolutionary to use “all” and then Judy Heffernan discovered that they made the same change, replacing “men,” in a Philadelphia parish church. But our…
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I love this Leonard Cohen song, presented here as a poem. It is both a realistic and hopeful take on the future – and on our mission for peace and justice. As he says, “They’re going to hear from me”… and from all of us.   Happy New Year! Anthem By Leonard Cohen The birds they…
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