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
For a number of years, my favorite event in the country was The Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The festival host, a gentleman named Ken Hefner would stand up in front of headlining artists’ audiences and challenge those audiences to be as prepared for the show, as the band that we … Read More
One of my favorite characters in all of literature is from a Dostoevsky novel called The Brothers Karamazov. The character’s name is Father Zosima. Father Zosima doles out wisdom throughout the course of the book and its particular instance stands out to me, it’s one of the moments that solidifies him as a favorite character. … Read More
Check One of the surprising benefits changes fruits in me, that have come from partnering with folks who work in the anti trafficking world has been a different understanding and a deeper understanding what it means to live in the body, or in a body. For instance, partnering with Amy Lynch here in the San … 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
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
“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
It was somewhere in the early 2000s when I got a package in the mail from a friend, who had just taken a job with an organization that purported to rescue people from slavery. And I’ve got to admit, and especially at the time, it was something of an embarrassing admission that I had no … Read More
I ran into a friend recently whom I haven’t seen in a while. And at first, I didn’t recognize him. Some of that had to do with the time between meetings. But more of it had to do with context. The last time I saw him was in California in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This … Read More
In the book Prayer: 40 Days of Practice, I take a swing at unpacking the word “spiritual;” not an effort to redefine the word for all users, but an effort to expand its application to meet my own experience and expectation. I do so by way of a kind of allegory; one in which a … Read More
