The coronavirus in the United States is highlighting the huge differences between the poor and lower middle classes and the rest of our country. It is focusing our attention on the elderly in senior living centers where the virus can affect all the patients and the staffs. It is helping us see how many more […]

Doesn’t the world seem so strange now? It’s been almost three weeks since Mechlenburg County, NC, insisted that we stay home and closed the restaurants, schools and other businesses like bars where people congregate. And I would say that I am finally used to staying at home all the time except for daily walks in […]

When I look back on my life, I can clearly see God in everything that happened: from spending my formative years in a hell-fire-and-damnation church to allowing me time to grow up, to mature before I had kids, from leading me out of the church into a cult where I learned that there are different […]

    In August of this year I heard Father Gregory Boyle speak in Charlotte about his work with gang members in East Los Angeles. For 35 years he has invited young men and women out of gangs into Homeboy and Homegirl Industries. He has written two books about his work, Tattoos on the Heart […]

A move, a new job, a marriage, a major illness, the death of a loved one–any transition can throw us off-kilter with a need to reorient ourselves and adapt to some changes in our lives. If we look at each change/each transition as a passage through a birth canal or a bridge into a new […]

In my own experience of being faithful to God, I have come across many areas of resistance that I have had to lay on the altar to find help in overcoming, to be healed of, to let go of. The Bible uses the timeline of 40 years to suggest a long, long time, for the […]

  “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.[1]   Suffering of all different kinds seems to be our lot in life on […]

             “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This second of the Beatitudes addresses all those who have lost someone or something dear to them. There is an emptiness in the people who mourn, a loss that hurts terribly. And yet death is the most natural of things that happen to every […]

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” [KJV] Today I am starting a nine-week series on the Beatitudes, looking at each one from several different points of view. I’ll be referencing the works of Dallas Willard, Cynthia Bourgeault, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Jean-Ives Leloup, Jim Forrest and the Message. Let’s […]

I am beginning to write a book about the Exodus story being our story, too. My thesis is that it is the template that God left us for how we get out of slavery to the world and into the kingdom of God. As I contemplate the passages in these five books of the Bible—Exodus, […]