My son and I recently went to see the most recent Marvel release. It’s a movie about Dr. Strange. He’s one of the primary characters in the Marvel Universe. And he is, according to his title, a master of the Mystic Arts, which begs a little bit of a question about what mystic is. See … Read More
I A few episodes ago, I shared a short story about being what I called misnamed at an event. The organizer called me a singer/songwriter when I was there to speak. Now, part of that setup for me emotionally was I was actually in the process of reinventing. I had been playing music for many, … Read More
Reinvention is one of the hallmarks of a long-term career as an artist. The ability and the desire, the capacity to take something that used to work a certain way during a certain season and do something new, something different with that same material with that same pattern with those same skills. One of the … Read More
In the introduction to last week’s episode, I mentioned that in the years I spent as a pastor in an evangelical setting, the conversation about the place of LGBTQ folks in a local church was a regular and often difficult one. That the Biblical image I kept coming back to was of Moses and his … Read More
During my time as a pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church, I was in an ongoing conversation about the relationship between LGBTQ folks and local churches. And over the years, regardless of all the different kinds of settings in which that conversation was happening, it kept bringing me back to this very particular biblical imagery. … Read More
Oh, the enneagram. It is, like many tools, so often misused or misapplied. It feels to me that a lot of folks are stuck between some form of infatuation with the tools or their type and some form of annoying disdain with the whole thing. I’m not a fan of the enneagram. Not the way … Read More
Sometimes what looks like compromise is not compromise at all. Sometimes it’s the hard choice to be a constant and a light in a shady and unstable environment. And sometimes it means being the one willing to be humbled and be wrong and change and grow in a stuck and calcified culture. I remember, after … Read More
Just as there are artists who work at the edges of a culture, pushing boundaries and breaking rules that need breaking, there are also artists doing essential work closer to the heart or center of their chosen culture. For two decades, Mike Donehey has taken the sacred trust of folks at the heart of his … Read More
“If you really wanted to help, you’d up and move to Africa.” It was a few minutes after I’d just spoken at a college chapel and a particularly fired-up student was trying to convince his classmates to resist child sponsorship in favor of a more radical and, in his mind, more holistic response to the … Read More
“Sometimes, God gives us glimpses into the enormity of the work at hand, not to increase our capacity to do a larger work or more work but so that the work we can do becomes more vital and less optional. We are compelled to do the work we can do because we cannot do all … Read More
