a minister's life

Religion and AI

2025-11-15T08:37:00.004-05:00

I've been learning a lot about AI.

The prod was a class I planned at the church--3 sessions over the course of the year to introduce our congregation to the major theological and ethical issues related to AI. The first class was held this past Thursday. We had about 30 folks sitting in a room, computers and tablets open, playing with AI and beginning (some of them for the first time) an exploration into what the technology does and what it promises (and threatens). The driver of the course has been a retired science professor in our congregation who approached me last year in a low-grade panic and said "everyone's going to be unemployed in a few years because of AI and that's going to be the church's problem so we should know how to prepare for it." I agreed to shape a class together.

A funny thing happened. We kept trying to recruit experts to teach members of our congregation (mostly novices) about AI. And one by one, the experts declined. Nobody wanted to be the voice/face of AI to the public. Nobody wanted to go "on record" to defend it or even explain it. Most seemed deeply ambivalent about it.

That should make you worried. It worries me.

I've tried to learn as much as I can. I've mostly read articles and listened to podcasts. The one I'd recommend most highly is called "The Last Invention." It chronicles the history of AI, introduces the major players, and ends with a set of 3 episodes tracing out the possible trajectories. It's a really good introduction to the technologies, ideas, people, and concerns.

I finally started using AI. Gemini has been popping up in my search, so I've tried that and generally, I find the search summaries helpful. I hate Siri--never seem to get reliable responses to my questions, so I never use any of the voice chats. I also really despise customer service chats of all kinds, so I'm predisposed to avoid anything resembling a chatbot. However, I've played with ChatGPT. I downloaded Claude on my phone and I'm going to give it a try. I've messed around with having various platforms write prayers and sermons, and they're fine; coherent, but uninspiring and acontextual, so I've never used one in a worship service.

I'm generally leaning into a posture of deep suspicion of AI. I don't think this is "artificial" intelligence--it's more like "alien" intelligence. It's non-human, and anything that is non-human I'm inclined to suspect is anti-human. Intelligence without feelings, without emotions, without genes, without a body, simply can't be trusted. I don't think I will ever trust anything that's not capable of love, which I believe is the highest expression of power in the universe.

AI cannot love. It therefore cannot be trusted.

Based on what I know about AI, we're racing to create an intelligence more powerful than human beings and fundamentally unsympathetic to human beings. It feels to me like a recipe for annihilation--not fast, but slow, silent, inexorable eradication.

I'll be encouraging my congregation to take the same posture in their personal lives and in public policy. And no, I won't be having Claude write any prayers or sermons.

Ryan Burge on Religion and Education

2025-05-19T09:14:00.003-04:00

If you are a person who is even remotely interested in religion and culture, you should be following Ryan Burge's Substack.

Burge is a Baptist pastor who is a data geek. Week after week, he pushes out really interesting observations (in graphical data form) about religion.

This week's is sooooooo interesting: in America, people with advanced educational degrees are more likely to attend church than people with a less formal education. Soak that in for a minute. It goes against every cultural stereotype. We have been conditioned to think that religion is for rubes, that only the uneducated "cling to God and guns." The data shows the opposite.

I could have told you this. We did a survey in our church about ten years ago and found that almost 60% of respondents have advanced degrees. Sixty percent. But it's not just in liberal churches. Even conservative churches are full of folks who have plenty of school under their belts.

What does this mean?

A couple of things, I think:

1) There may be some connection, deeper in the psyche, that links academic achievement with religious participation. Perhaps it's some proclivity toward order, or routinization. Academic achievement requires order, discipline. Maybe the same kinds of worldviews map onto academic and religion with respect to internal and external order.

OR...

2) Maybe people who have thought a bit more deeply about the world are open to mystery beyond what is knowable. The saying goes, "the only true wisdom is awareness of your own ignorance." Religion picks up where the limits of one's rational faculties falter. Perhaps people who have spent time learning become curious about these limits, and are drawn toward the wondering space of religion

OR...

3) Maybe religion in most communities is a class marker--a pillar of class establishment. Perhaps educated people are given a kind of status by going to--and participating in the leadership of--churches. Churches could be, wittingly or unwittingly, placeholders in class hierarchies.

I don't know the answer. But no one should be shocked by the kinship between learning and religion. Anyone who has familiarity with Judaism knows that there is nothing intrinsically incompatible with academic achievement and fidelity to God. In fact, I do think that Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" idea generally holds--that science (learning) and religion are two compatible and non-contradictory modes of inquiry into the nature of all things.

Deep learning and deep religiosity, in my own experience, are the best of friends.

The Hypocrisy of Liberal Democracy

2025-05-07T08:40:00.003-04:00

Every liberal hates Trump. For good reason. He's a sad, damaged man who is trying his damndest to download his vile worldview into the American operating system. Maybe it's a strange time then to read a book that criticizes the "stable, virtuous" political system that Trump is dismantling. But I've just finished such a book: Omar El Akkad's, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It's a memoir of his experience as an Egyptian-born immigrant to Canada and the United States, but the story is less about El Akkad and more about how the west "sees" the Arab world. El Akkad finds himself at home with his young children, unable to stop watching graphic images of Palestinian childrens' bodies torn apart in the Gaza siege. The question that he asks is the question any person faced with such violence should ask: "why aren't we doing everything in our power to stop this?"

Put another way, what version of "morality" abides this kind of violence? El Akkad's answer is sober. "Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable (15)."

Americans--conservative and liberal--are so conditioned to seeing ourselves as virtuous. Our national story is the City on the Hill, a shining example of freedom for the world. El Akkad understands there is just enough truth to this image for it to persevere--America is "free enough" to still draw immigrants like his own family. But the story is so much more complicated for most immigrants. America doesn't draw people here from other countries because of its virtue so much as it woos them with vague promises that they, too, can participate in the "privilege" that the west flaunts. America also threatens: immigrants are afraid--after centuries of colonial imposition--that the only way to survive in this world is to fit in with the colonizer. Assimilate or die.

The genocide in Gaza is the event that explodes all pretense of American virtue. America arms Israel; Israel brazenly annihilates a whole people. El Akkad listens to the Biden administration's statements lamenting the "loss of life" and other abhorrent political euphemisms. All words wither against the uncensored images of mangled bodies.

The fierce declarations of this book will stay with me. As a follower of Jesus, I have put morality and the insistence on human dignity at the center of what I think of as "the good life." I have worked furiously to try and redeem America as a place of political possibility--the dream of a land where "all people are created equal" and treated as such. El Akkad's writing is urgent and sharp, his moral vision clear. The United States is a butcher. Only squaring with this reality allows any hope for a different future. "The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?"

Why Church is Awesome (Episode 10,203): Intergenerational Friendships

2025-05-01T08:58:00.006-04:00

This week in The Atlantic, I noticed an article/podcast interview, "How to Age Up Together?," by Natalie Brennen and Yasmin Tayag. They interview Eunice Nichols of Co-Generate, an organization that facilitates intergenerational interactions. Nichols says that Americans have never been more age-segregated than we are now. In the past, our communities were structured to create intergenerational homes and communities:

Yeah, so on the age-segregation side, we went from having kind of these age-integrated one-room schoolhouses, and the agrarian society meant younger and older people worked together, side by side out in the fields. But then, there were all of these great innovations in policy. So child-labor laws: I think we all agree that’s a very good thing. Universal schooling, I think we agree that’s a really good thing. Social security, which provided a safety net for older adults, and at the same time made room for young people who are experiencing massive un- and underemployment. These were parts of societal infrastructure built to help us. But the unexpected part of that innovation was that it pulled generations apart. All of a sudden, kids were in schools, middle-aged people had jobs, and older people were in retirement communities.

There's a ton of good anecdotes and stories in the article about how all generations benefit from intergenerational relationships: older folks don't want to be isolated in age-segregated communities, and younger folks need the hard-earned wisdom, perspective, and resources ($!) that older folks often possess. It's a lot of common sense, but when you hear it articulated, you think, "damn, we really have to figure out how to live together across generations in meaningful ways again." You want to go out and join an intergenerational community. But when the article gets to the same conclusion, it suggests... service and book clubs. Huh?

How about church (ie, religion)? Religious institutions are the best intergeneration communities that have ever existed. We exist specifically to bring generations together. We sanctify (ie, mark as "sacred") every milestone over the course of the lifetime: birth, baptism, coming-of-age, graduation, marriage, anniversaries, and death. A faith community is community of care in which people of all ages witness and walk together through the whole of life; we all share in the meaning-making. In between milestone moments, we eat and serve together across generations. No offense to Co-Generate, but faith communities have literally mastered the art of intergenerational relationships.

I came back to church in my 20s when I was working crazy hard in my first job, but I was also extremely lonely--I found at church people who were asking the same existential questions about the meaning of life and the nature of the good that I was asking--only they'd been asking those questions and living in the direction of their answers for three times as long as I'd been alive! It was a balm to my soul to be in their company. My kids have had the great gift of growing up in a church where they are known by adults who are not their parents--people in their 50s and 60s and 90s who have a genuine interest in their lives. My kids will return to this church when they are in college and delight in seeing those same folks. They will come back some day for some of their funerals and give thanks to God for the person who taught them in Sunday School or cheered them on from the sidelines.

Want intergenerational friendships? Go to the place that's been doing it forever. Go to church.

Celebrating Earth Day at Church

2025-04-28T08:59:00.003-04:00

I wish I had pictures. Or video. Or some visual record of what happened at church yesterday.

It was awesome. Here's what we did to mark Earth Day at NDPC.

This is the 2nd time we've tried a version of liturgist Claudio Carvalhaes' moving (and oddly controversial) "Plant Confessional." We move all of our sanctuary plants to the middle of the worship space. These plants are large potted palms that sit quietly every Sunday in the corner of the worship space. They are, put bluntly, decorative. But they are lovingly watered by volunteers and a few times a year, we pull them into the center of the sanctuary and declare: "these are members of our congregation!"

The point is to get us to see, think, and act differently toward non-human creatures. Plants are part of God's good creation, but human beings have developed social ethics that make plants less-than--expendable. We've also developed forms of worship that are completely blind to the natural world--ensconsed in climate-controlled indoor spaces, with ordered rows of chairs--nothing about worship invites us to consider the graces of the Creation. The church must challenge that conceit, and affirm that plants are unique beings, bearing the "image" of the Creator; beings without whom human beings would cease to exist. They "belong" to the congregation as much as any person.

In addition to pulling the plants into the middle, yesterday as people came into worship we passed out a "natural object" to each one. Each person held a blossom, a pinecone, a nut husk, a leaf, a stick. During our "confession," each was invited to meditate on their object. The question I asked everyone to consider was: "what is the quality of your relationship to the natural world?" The same way we reflect on our relationships to people--our spouses, parents, children, friends--we benefit by time spent reflecting on the quality of our relationship to nature. What was that relationship like when you were a child? Has it changed over time? When have you "fed" this relationship? When have you violated it? What wisdom does the natural world offer you about God, if you listen? At the end of the silent meditation, we shared the Peace of Christ, but I specifically invited people to share the peace with the Sanctuary plants. If Christ's death and resurrection reconciles us to one another, it also reconciles us to Creation itself. Many did--they came forward to the large mound of greenery and gently touched the leaves, admired their shape, and talked with the flora. It was gorgeous and silly, and I guarantee you that those people will think differently about their relationship to plants going forward.

Following a reading of Psalm 96, and 3 moving 5-min reflections by church members on the book Refugia Faith (which had been the focus of a Lenten study group, sponsored by our Creation Care team), we invited the congregation to walk outside.

It was a beautiful spring morning in Georgia, and gathered in a semicircle around a pre-dug hole, an elder of the church offered prayers for our congregation and for the earth. Then, we blessed a beautiful native fringe tree. I invited a brief reflection on the proverb (common to the 3 Abrahamic faiths), "if you knew the world would end tomorrow, today you should plant a tree." We invited everyone to consider the soil--our kinship with the soil is established in Genesis 2. We celebrated that there is a "time to plant" (Ecclesiastes). We welcomed the grace of rain and the growth that God gives.

As this was all going on, something magical happened. The kids came forward. Without being summoned, as the anticipation around the planting grew, the kids in worship left their adults and wandered in close. So close, that they were crowded right around the tree. When the invitation finally came--when the tree was in the hole and the congregation was invited to grab handfuls of dirt and pack it around the roots, the kids were the first to join in. They reached for handful after handful. The kids all took home plenty of of dirt under their fingernails as a memory of the day. The kids poured 4 large baptismal pitchers of water over the roots. We sang, shared a benediction, and many lingered around the tree in the sun-dappled shade as worship ended.

Ritual is the most beautiful language we have in this world. But ritual that speaks the same notes over and over--ritual that never asks anything different from us--is a dead language (think Latin). In this moment of ecological catastrophe, ritual should awaken us. In this case, the vision of the ritual was not to induce us to shame (though that would be warranted), but to inspire us to deeper love--to be in love with the Creation.

Holy Week is about power

2025-04-16T08:46:00.003-04:00

I spoke with 25 teenagers yesterday at a local high school's Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting. They listened well and engaged in conversation with me--pretty impressive for 7:30 in the morning on a Tuesday.

I talked to them about Holy Week and what to make of it. It's hard to get the full picture of Holy Week, even IF you attend all 3 (or 4 or 5) services at your church. You really need to read the whole gospel to grasp it. Each of the gospels has a different way of slowly building the tension between Jesus and the established powers. Unless you read the whole thing, and feel that building tension and then experience the explosion of conflict in Holy Week, you may not notice what is so clear when I read the entire story: the good news of Jesus is not about salvation--it's about power. It's an answer to the question, "what is true power?"

Power is the ability to get something done. In physics, it's creating change. In our social life, it's the ability to compel someone to do what you want them to do.

The Christian gospels make the case that true power is not compulsion--not "power over," but power for and with. It's the power of love, of goodness. The ability of the state and religious authorities and economic norms to compel our behavior may appear to be the site of authority. But Jesus presents a different vision. His Palm Sunday parade is a parody of a Roman military procession. He upturns the tables of the grifters in the Temple to assert that some things in our world must be kept sacred and not desecrated by profit-taking. Jesus challenges the idea that emperor has any power at all by declaring that all things belong to God. He submits his body to the violence of the state, while remaining steadfast in the practice of nonviolent resistance (though the Garden of Gethsemane suggests Jesus wavers more than a bit). Jesus' resurrection is the power of God swallowing up the powers that tried to impose themselves on Jesus' Reign of love.

I am still coming to an awareness of how deeply the story of Holy Week subverts and rejects our norms of power. I'm holding the question of what faithfulness to Jesus' power should look like in my life at this moment when our president is leaning heavily into painful yet partial imperial power.

Christians Should Oppose Religious Freedom Laws

2025-02-25T16:12:00.005-05:00

Just got a note that a "Religious Freedom" law is coming back in front of the Georgia General Assembly.

These are bad, dumb laws. Here's why:

These laws purport to be about religious freedom. Who doesn't like religious freedom? You get the idea that there's some little ol' lover of Jesus (or Muhammed, peace be upon him) out there who's being denied the ability to worship in the way they want. How un-American! Let's protect religious freedom!

Not true. People can worship freely already. These new "RFRA" laws are really about asking state legislatures to grant permission to businesses to legally discriminate. Christian business owners are pushing RFRA laws because they want permission to refuse to pay for their employees' reproductive healthcare services, contraception, and HIV care, or otherwise deny their obligation to serve customers whose values don't "align" with their religion.

Where to begin with this foolishness? First of all, can a business be "Christian?" Does a "Christian business" have "religious rights?" Businesses are not people (I can't believe I have to write that). Businesses are legal entities created/authorized by the state--they don't have intrinsic rights. I'm no constitutional law specialist, but it seems pretty clear to me that individual religious freedom and this imagined "religious freedom" of businesses are two very different things--one is real, one is a sham.

Back in the 50s and 60s, racist business owners made the same case: we shouldn't have to serve Blacks because it violates our principles. Our court system said, "tough. Suck it up." If you open a business, you're able to open it (ie, you have street access, mail services, utilities, police protection) because your business serves a public interest. You have to serve the whole public. You don't get to decide who you serve and who you refuse service to (look up "Heart of Atlanta Motel"). The same thing should be true with healthcare. As long as we are stuck with this ridiculous private insurance healthcare system, why should your employer get to decide which health services you have access to? They shouldn't.

Even IF we granted that businesses could be "religious" and had "rights" (which they don't), why would a religious business discriminate? Christians are called to love and serve others, even (especially?) our enemies. The religious response would be to smother them with love and kindness, right?

In Georgia, the profound hypocrisy of this law is that we are one of 3 states left without anti-discrimination statutes that protect LGBTQ citizens from discrimination. That's right--it's ALREADY legal to discriminate against queer folk in Georgia. THAT is the law that needs to change. That's a change that would actually, unironically, be "Christian."

Want to fight RFRA and work for anti-discrimination laws? Give a few bucks to Georgia Equality!

Lehman Brothers

2025-02-21T13:47:00.004-05:00

Went to a play last night. The Lehman Trilogy, at Theatrical Outfit, tells the true story about the rise and fall of the financial company.

It’s a beautifully written play and the Atlanta production is terrific. You should see it. Wednesdays are pay-what-you-can.

It’s got me completely mixed up, though, when it comes to figuring out what kind of story this is. It is, on its face, an immigrant story. Three brothers migrate from Germany to Montgomery, AL, where they open a clothing shop. Relationships with plantation employees and owners shift the brothers into being cotton brokers. From there, they open a storefront in New York, expand to other commodities, and eventually turn their business into a bank, and finally, a “financial services” corporation.

The morality tale is so confusing. The brothers are sympathetic—Jews in the Antebellum South, they made themselves something out of nothing. But the play makes very little of their complicity with slaveholding. The brothers’ religiosity, which is featured prominently in the play, seems entirely focused on personal character, family bonds, and in-group solidarity, has no bearing on their relation to structural sin. The way Judaism is depicted in the story made one person near me wonder if the play was anti-Semitic.

The play is also confusing when it comes to its treatment of capitalism. Is it good when it’s in the hands of faithful, devout brothers, but bad when it’s in the hands free-range, secular outsiders? Is it good when it’s inhabited by virtuous actors but infinitely corruptible in the hands of the unvirtuous? Is it good when it’s small and local but bad when it’s national or international and removed from face-to-face or blood ties? Is it good when it’s tied to the buying and selling of actual commodities but bad when it’s abstracted to money making money? All of these criticisms are legitimate, but none is clearly identified in the play.

The play ends up being a tragedy—the family disintegrates, the faith disappears, the pursuit of wealth swallows the whole. But no one inside the system is ever to blame. It’s a tragedy with no villains, no one to hold responsible for their failure to see the end that was coming. Is that what capitalism is? Is that where we’re all heading? A tragic end that no one saw coming and no one is to blame? That’s hardly a true story.

Reckoning with History: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Making of American Christianity

2025-02-20T18:12:00.006-05:00

Columbia Seminary church historian William Yoo has written another good book. By "good," I mean hard, well-researched, effective. His last book, "What Kind of Christianity" establishes a solid case that the Presbyterian Church USA would not exist without enslavement. It's a claim by the past upon the present--by those crushed, killed, raped, and separated by our "Christian" ancestors who have something to say about how we live as a church today.

William launched his book a few weeks ago at our church. It broadens the scope from the PCUSA to American Christianity as a whole. Few, if any, American Christians are free from that stains of our ancestors' sins. If you're curious to explore what the book is about, here's the recording.

Here is what I said that evening--my response to Dr. Yoo after reading his work:

Reckoning with History is an ambitious book: you take two huge, awful topics—slavery and settler colonialism; two topics that are either uncomfortable or illegal to talk about…
With each of these topics, you’re asking, as Christians: how? How could it be that followers of the Prince of Peace, the one who said, “love your neighbor as yourself” were capable of the grotesque de-valuing of human life that was required to justify seizing this land from the people who lived here and then capturing and brutalizing people to make a profit from it?

I think this version of history is ambitious. But I want to note that you are rejecting several other ways of telling this history:

You reject the idea, popular on the right, that the history of injustice shouldn’t be told; that we need to “move on” from all of this icky, uncomfortable stuff because it makes white people feel bad.

You’re rejecting the “Doctrine of Discovery” thesis, in which there was some ancient, sinister “master plan” with roots in the papacy that played out over centuries; there wasn’t a malevolent script embedded in white Christianity that we can blame for these evils.

You’re rejecting the meta story of “inexorable liberal progress”; you’re saying we can’t overlook misdeeds of our ancestors because they lived in times when “they didn’t know any better.” They did know better. You are clear about this because you lift up the voices of people who were speaking and working against land-theft and enslavement.

You’re also rejecting the selective way that some of look only to the past and cherry pick our historical ‘heroes.” The William Lloyd Garrisons, you say, were few and far between. There were at least as many James Henley Thornwells in our family tree.

The people who appear in the pages of your book are inevitably the people who left writing behind for you (and us) to read. You give us these beautifully detailed passages from Indigenous Activists and Abolitionists. You also tell us about the defenders of Indian Removal and Slavery. You show us the people who are articulating the moral poles on these questions.

But I think the “main characters” in your book are silent. I think your main characters are the people like us. People who aren’t going to have our thoughts written in history books.

We are people who go to church. Who vote. Who move through the world every day, making choices. Our choices are informed by all kinds of things. Sometimes they are informed by the soaring ideals of our religion. Most often, our lives and values are informed by much more pedantic motives: Expediency—what’s easy. Desire—what we want. Fear—what we’re afraid of.

As the horrible realities of settler colonialism and slavery imposed themselves on the lives of “regular” Christians, we had to make decisions about whether we would comply or dissent.

If we comply, if we go along with the injustices, we feel no external friction because they are legitimated by the culture. Any friction we might feel is internal—it’s in the conscience. It’s uncomfortable inside to follow a liberating Christ and enslave another person. You make the clear case that this kind of cognitive dissonance becomes intolerable after a while. White people had to invent increasingly strident theological defenses of slavery to resolve cognitive dissonance. We’ve had to intentionally mis-remember our history—by glorifying the landing at Plymouth Rock and erasing the legacy of slavery.

If regular people resist injustice, if we resolve the internal dissonance, we face external friction. You’re risking friendship. You’re risking going against the law. You’re risking the social ties that give you access to employment and emotional support. You alienate friends and family. You might even face threats or bodily harm. Very few people are courageous enough—or foolish enough—to do that.

Through your whole story, even as you tell us about the stalwarts on both sides of these moral atrocities, there’s a “silent majority” in the background. You’re asking us, what would you have done if it were you? When we sit with those questions, I think we’re also exercising a moral muscle. One that allows us to ask, “are there compromises that we’re making now? Is our life of faith a life of discipleship or expediency?

What I'm Reading Now

2025-02-17T08:44:00.011-05:00

It's a good time to be well-read (and by "read" we now include podcasts). It's always a good time to be well-read, but now, as much as ever.

For news, I read:

The New York Times - skews liberal and media bias is a liberal blind spot, but they've put enough moderate conservatives (Douthat, French, Stephens, Brooks) on the opinion page--people who understand conservatism from the inside well enough to be trustworthy interpreters of the current political moment. Plus, Margaret Renkl. Plus, part of me still feels like a New Yorker. I subscribe to my local paper, the AJC, and I read their daily email digest of Georgia political news; but I only glance at the headlines and read an article or two a day as opposed to the 5-10 NYT articles I read each day.
The Atlantic - I've subscribed to the Atlantic since I graduated from college--it was my first attempt at being an informed adult; consistently great reporting and writing on subjects that matter to me. It's where I first read some of my most-admired writer/journalist/essayists: David Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan, Sandra Tsing Loh, and William Langewiesche.

Substacks:

Bill McKibben - one of my personal heroes; climate news from a pragmatic, progressive Christian environmental activist; the best source of information and commentary I have on the most important subject there is.
Rebecca Solnit - her new column, Meditations in an Emergency, has been a welcome presence in my inbox; she consistently looks beneath politics for the human dynamics that are always under the surface; we are never, in Solnit's gaze, anything other than human beings; she is a relentless champion of things human beings need: community, kindness, and love.

Podcasts:

Slate Political Gabfest - covers the news each week; the conversations always deepen my understanding of the week's main news stories; funny, too.
The Dig - I need something in my feed that does class analysis; I'm still a capitalist; but a capitalist who doesn't take Marxist critiques seriously is a tool/fool.
Poetry Unbound - Padraig O'Tuama's poetry analysis is the closest I can bear to listening to a sermon each week.

That's it. I read and study the Bible every week. I read one book at at time (right now, it's Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas). I read poetry every week. I might tune into a few other podcasts depending on the topic. I have time for this reading because don't watch any movies or TV shows--nope, not ever; if I watch TV, it's live sports.

Would love to know what you read/watch to keep your mind fresh. Leave a note in the comments.

President Dorian Gray

2025-02-10T10:45:00.002-05:00

What I love about Frump is that he's using all of the tools available to him to exercise his power! I love it when people use power in new and interesting ways to get things done. Yes, the DOG-E stuff is illegal (Congress determines funding and the existence of federal agencies, not the executive) and morally deplorable (he's targeting things he doesn't like, not things that need "reform" or will save money), but Frump is making so many people angry because it's so ingenious and effective. At some point in these first few weeks, he'll run out of interesting ideas to piss off liberals and antagonize his enemies, and at some point I'd expect the courts and Congress will get in involved and it will be interesting to witness that battle unfold. But so far, Frump has had an admirable plan to exercise legitimate powers and create such brash new ones that the system had no idea how to respond.

While I have great respect for the boldness of these first few weeks, Frump remains awful. Just an awful person. So morally disfigured. I can't bear to even look at him. He's the Dorian Grey of American capitalism--every wretched excess, every unholy impulse is etched in his unseemly orange visage. It's like looking at capitalism's grotesque shadow--greed, short-term thinking, externalizing costs onto others.

Frump's 2nd term agenda emerges from his disfigured character: it's either a) cruel or b) self-enriching. Those are Frump's only two coherent motivations. That seems to be what gets him up in the morning (or keeps him up all night). Everything fits into one of two categories: the politics of cruelty (immigrants, USAID, gender), or the politics of self-enrichment (pardoning J6 rioters, Panama Canal pronouncements, CFPB). I'll be interested to see how far cruelty and self-enrichment can get him before his popularity shrinks from where it is now (about 45%), to 35%, to 25%. Where's the tipping point?

What is Government For?

2025-02-05T09:51:00.004-05:00

Here we are, three weeks into Trump.

I’m amazed at how effective he’s been. The incompetence of his first administration, and Trump’s general disinterest in doing anything hard or detail-oriented didn’t portend success in remaking the whole federal government. The immigrant raids, gender declarations, and climate treaty withdrawals were easy. What has surprised me—and maybe him—was the Musk-Vought takeover of the government’s finances: the sudden and radical defunding of the US government.

Granted, that defunding project has a long way to go. Firing the entire federal workforce would only trim the budget by 4%. Big savings can only come by cutting the military, Social Security, and Medicare. And it’s not clear that anything that Musk is doing is actually legal—separation of powers used to say that funding decisions belonged to Congress, not the executive. I’m not holding out hope for Congress to step in.

But I’m most interested in the ideological project that the administration is advancing: that small, efficient government is better. I think they’re winning that argument. The liberals I read who are responding to Trump right now are avoiding that question. They are shocked by the cruelty and the illegality. To me, the only important question is “what is government for and is what Trump is doing consistent with good government.” If liberals can’t articulate a vision and rstionale for the larger, more engaged (and costly) government, we will lose.

Trump/Musk/Vought are crusaders motivated by an ideological vision that government must be tiny, unobtrusive, and “efficient.” It’s actually an appealing vision on its face, especially if you are motivated by the idea that taxes are theft. A small government does only what it must in order to keep public safety and ensure ordered markets. It’s a tool of the market—the market is the true guiding force that creates the common good.

It’s this idea that I want to attack and reveal as morally abhorrent. Markets do not create the common good. Markets distribute goods and services, set prices, organize labor and capital. Markets cannot and will never create the common good. They are PART of the common good, but don’t begin to touch the breadth and depth of what “goodness” is. Markets are cruel. They require winners and losers. The profit motive relentlessly externalizes costs—to people, to the earth. Markets elevate greed and discourage self-sacrifice and sharing. Markets are important for human flourishing, but they distort and disfigure people, and divide human societies into capital and labor, winners and losers. Markets have no capacity to “think” about the common good.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these ends, we have government. That’s a shorthand of the way Declaration of Independence begins. It’s a statement about why we have government—what it’s for. To help people have life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Only the most narrow market fundamentalist would construe providing for “life, liberty, and happiness” as a government whose only role is to protect private property and facilitate efficient markets.

Ontologically, the human being is not a “profit maximizer.” We are souls. We long for healthy relationships. We want to live in healthy, thriving communities that are ecologically sustainable. We want to alleviate one another’s suffering and create beauty. We want long lives in healthy bodies. We want to learn and play with ideas. We want peace and freedom from harm. We want to laugh and dance. We want to work and we want to rest from our labors. The market can’t do all of these things for us. Nor can government. But government—a more active government than the one Musk/Vought are fashioning—can and does move us closer to these ends than markets alone. It does this by promoting common goods that the market can’t—and will never—promote, because they aren’t “profitable.” Education for every citizen. Environmental protection. Healthcare for everyone. Public safety for everyone (not just capital). Labor laws that protect workers. Public arts (not arts for the wealthy). Protecting the rights of unpopular minority groups. Scientific research that isn’t directed toward private profit. You get the idea. Governments have a role in life, liberty, and happiness beyond being a slave of private profit.

Our government and federal bureaucracy IS bloated. There is waste. It’s become horribly stagnant and unresponsive, so much so that people feel justified in demonizing it, and treating taxes like theft. Part of me is relieved that this moment has come. The great violent fantasy of a “government small enough to drown in a bathtub” is upon us. The pain of these cuts will be excruciating. People will suffer grievously.

Now is the time for fierce pronouncments about what government is for. It’s time for liberals to stop rubbing our hands in consternation about USAID and start talking about life, liberty, and happiness and the role good government plays in that profoundly moral vision for human flourishing.

What is a Funeral For?

2025-01-28T11:03:00.006-05:00

What happens at a funeral? What are we doing when we gather around a person who has died?

There's a long-simmering, kinda fierce, largely unarticulated debate within the church about what a funeral is for. The traditional answer is that the funeral service is a "witness to the resurrection." The focus, according to tradition, is the proclamation of God's resurrecting power.

I won't argue with that. But I will take issue with how that goal is traditionally--and best--done.

Funerals are where some of the most egregious instances of ministerial malpractice in Christendom take place. Clergy screw up funerals all the time. Funerals wound families and they turn people away from the church. The cliched example is the Baptist funeral where the preacher questions if the deceased had sufficient evidence of being "saved." Or perhaps the preacher uses the occasion of the death of a beloved to harangue the congregation, by fear or threat or shame, to "give their lives to Christ" so they don't end up in hell. Nothing communicates "Good News" like shame and guilt. Now, I get that some of my Christian siblings truly feel that the "right" words at a funeral can move people toward their literal eternal salvation, so, if that's you, go for it. Good luck.

The other example of profound ministerial malpractice is the highly liturgical service in which the deceased in hardly mentioned. The liturgy marches through, sometimes beautifully, triumphantly proclaiming wonderful things about God and resurrection, but hardly mentioning the particular person around whose death (and life) we have gathered. It's as though the individual person who died is insignificant--what matters is the church and its "proclamation."

The presenting issue at the funeral, in my own experience, isn't eternal salvation. People don't really care about heaven or hell. What they care about is that someone they know, and maybe love, is dead. And their death--and the chasm of that person's absence--and the memories, good, bad, and otherwise, that they leave us.... that is the presenting issue. What do I do with this death? What does it mean? That is what the ritual must tend to.

My conviction--and I could be on this limb alone--is that the funeral (I use this interchangeably with "memorial service"--the difference is the presence, in the former, of a corpse) is an occasion in which the task of the clergy and the church is to witness to the love of God and God's resurrecting power in the particular life of the deceased. Did God's love "save" this person?

Another way of getting at this is to say that we don’t know God apart from our relationships with each other. There can no "relationship" with God that does not draw us into complex loving relationships with others. In effect, we know God--who God is, how God "works," what faith in God looks and feels like--in and through our life together. We know God in our life with and love for the deceased. What happens to that love when it feels like it’s gone away?

When someone dies, it's a profound opportunity to see God’s love at work. In a funeral, we must talk about the deceased--about the particular contours of their life: the joys, the heartbreaks, the weakness, the struggle, the suffering, the overcoming, the desire, the giftedness. I want to know who they loved and how they loved. I've heard grumpy Christians say, "I don't come to a funeral to hear someone's obituary read." But I believe that unless we hold up the banal details of that person's life and examine them to see the way God might have been moving in that person's life--a love that urged them to lose themselves in something bigger than themselves, a love that healed them, forgave them, gave them grace and courage to seek the common good--if we can't pull those pieces of the deceased's life out and share them, we've done nothing worthwhile.

If we are resurrected (and I think we are), we are not resurrected in spite of our particularities, but with and in and through them.

When a funeral "works," you should hear that person's voice, you should see their face in your mind's eye, and you should marvel at the way God's love moved in that person's life. We're not worshiping the person. We're declaring that this was one of God's unique creations--a "sheep of God's own fold, a lamb of God's own flock, a sinner of God's own redeeming." We know the Creator through the creation, the Redeemer through the redeemed, the Sustainer through the one sustained.

Our culture is bereft of death rituals. If we all had Irish wakes--if we took time to sit with our deceased in our homes, and told stories, poured drinks, shared food, danced, sung, laughed, and grieved at home--there would be no need to do name particularities in church—we’d just focus on God. But we don't have these rituals. People die in sterile hospital rooms, where there is no laughter or singing or drinking allowed. We need a space to make theological sense of every person's existence on this earth, especially when we shared a significant part of our life with that person and they are now physically gone from our presence.

The funeral is a celebration of God's life in the life of the deceased. Anything else is ministerial malpractice.

Quiet, Unyielding Clarity

2025-01-22T11:11:00.016-05:00

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington DC was on the front page of American newspapers yesterday. It’s very rare for mainline pastors to find ourselves anywhere near the news.

Why was she in the news? For a sermon she preached, inviting listeners to practice mercy. Mercy is showing kindness, especially to someone who is suffering, or to someone over whom you have power.

Mercy is hardly controversial, biblically speaking. Mercy, I would argue, is the defining characteristic of God, who is “merciful and just, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” God’s people are required to be merciful, as God is. It’s not optional. The prophet Micah says, “what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?” Jesus was also passionate about mercy. He famously told a story about a Samaritan who stopped and helped a man who was injured and dying; the punchline of the story is, “who is a neighbor? One who shows mercy.”

So the bishop preached about showing mercy, specifically to immigrants who live and work in our neighborhoods and to neighbors who identify as gender nonbinary.

Why was a sermon about mercy news? The President of the United States was in the front pew. And later that night, the President expressed personal outrage at the sermon.

The President is morally deformed. When a human being can't receive an invitation to consider mercy, that person's moral compass is broken. They are lost in a self-referencing moral darkness. That person cannot feel, cannot connect to the vibrating moral chords that are the very way God the Creator binds all of us together. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, justice, and mercy are the way loving relationships function. The President is morally broken. He cannot be trusted to hold power responsibly. He needs our compassion. He needs therapy. He needs a pastor. He needs help.

Beth and the Bishop

I got to spend a week with Bishop Budde a few summers ago in a poetry and spirituality retreat. She's one of the coolest, most competent religious leaders I've ever met. Did you notice that she didn't need to shout or engage in histrionics to unmask the most powerful man in the world as a moral child? She simply shared the Good News of God's mercy with quiet, unyielding clarity.

Jimmy Carter

2024-12-29T18:24:00.012-05:00

Our family made the pilgrimage to Plains, GA to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday School in August of 2018. We were one of tens of thousands to make that journey over the years. It's quite funny to me that so many people went through so much effort to go hear a very plain spoken man offer his interpretation of the scriptures that are available to any one of at any moment of our day. What did we go to hear? What were we looking for?

We drove from Atlanta to Plains on Saturday night, squeezed into a small motel room, and got up waaaay too early that muggy morning (4:30AM?) to get in line at the church. We made it in. We enjoyed Sunday School and worship. I can't honestly remember the text Carter taught on. I recall he didn't do much creative with the text. He was good natured, but not overly entertaining or scholarly. He mostly interpreted the text plainly, told stories from his life, and asked people questions. You didn't get the impression that he was "teaching," so much as inviting a conversation with the text--as though the text were a good friend of his, and he wanted to introduce us.

Carter's plainspokenness was a signature. He is the source of one of my favorite Christian quotes: “loving your neighbor means loving the person God puts in front of you.” Simple to say. So, so, so hard to do.

I love that he went back to Plains. Plains couldn't be further from anywhere "important." It reminds me as much as anywhere I've been, of where Moses meets God at the burning bush: the "edge of the wilderness." Beyond the beyond. But Carter never left Plains--or Plains never left him. When he returned to live there, he stayed in the same modest ranch house that was always his home. Most of the knowledge-economy Democrats I know wouldn't be caught dead living in a place like Plains (including, regrettably, me). But Carter's connection to Plains--and it's plain-ness--is a testament to the quality of his personhood.

Carter is one President who had a greater impact on the world after he left office than during. Habitat for Humanity, which he championed and grew out of the Christian imagination in Americus, GA, still makes a meaningful difference in low-income home ownership. The Carter Center is an extraordinary institution that has changed the world through vaccinations, healthcare, mental health, election security, and peacemaking.

"Love your neighbor" is our only truly important job. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Alternative Lessons and Carols

2024-12-28T09:03:00.002-05:00

Here's the liturgy for our Christmas Eve "alternative" lessons and carols. By "alternative," I mean I've been searching for years for a service like the traditional King's College 9 lessons and carols, but something that's a bit less stodgy, a bit more modern. Something that probes a little deeper with language that gets closer to what Christmas means. I like the lessons and carols format very much--the readings and music in dialectical relationship. So, I've been messing with it for years, trying to find the right balance of enough tradition so that the service doesn't alienate people who come looking for "traditional Christmas," but enough novelty so that the radical nature of the event leaps out and surprises.

Below is the liturgy we came up with this year at NDPC.

I can't, in good conscience, leave out Isaiah 9 and Luke 2 on Christmas Eve. But I loved the way the Catherine de Vinck poem sets a tone of wonder and sets the incarnation "off to the side," as though it creeps in from the "far edges" of both geography and our conscience. The Madeleine L'Engle quote does two things--creates a cosmic scale for Jesus' birth and grounds it in the bodily process of human gestation. Then, the Merton quote also does two things--it brings the incarnation of Jesus into modernity with its familiar alienating systems and processes, and it aligns Jesus with the poor and outcast.

Did the liturgy "work?" That's not for me to decide. But I thought we did a better job this year of bringing the glory and humility of Christ's birth into conversation.

Next year, I don't think we'll sing Silent Night as the candlelight carol. It was the weakest part of the service. The words don't match the theological space we'd created. That will be a "radical" change. But there are better songs.

Merry Christmas!

2024-12-24T17:36:00.004-05:00

Merry Christmas Eve, friends.

We held services today at 11AM, 5PM, and 7PM. It’s a lot, but much more manageable than it used to be. We used to have an 11PM service, but we cancelled it a few years ago—there were about 50 die-hards who would come but it was unnecessarily rough on us as a clergy couple with young children. We’ve been moving the service gradually earlier, first 9PM, now 7. The 11AM was added a few years ago, because we would always hear of people who were traveling or entertaining family at night or just didn’t want to drive in the dark. It’s a smaller service—60 or so—but the spirit is so lovely.

5PM, pictured above, is led by my amazing colleague, Rev. Dr. Erin Reed Cooper. She tells the Christmas story using a storytelling method called Godly Play, and the kids all come up around her. It’s magical. The kids are literally leaning in quietly for 20 minutes to find out what happens next. There are 160 or so people here tonight and it feels like 95% of them are under 5. As I stood in the lobby greeting folks as they arrived, there were meltdowns, poopy diapers needing changing, pajamas, and tons of loving and mildly stressed parents and grandparents. We have a good group of folks who are pretty serious about raising their kids in this religious tradition. Christmas is more powerful when it’s part of a larger tradition the kids are learning about and practicing each week.

The 7PM is always my favorite. One, because it’s dark and Christmas in the dark kicks ass. But also because, after 15 years here, it’s sweet for me to see all the college students and young adults who come back and to be able to remember them as kids growing up here. That they want to come back and visit at Christmas is the best.

Tonight in worship we tried something different. And it almost backfired spectacularly. Instead of an Advent wreath, we built a manger over the four Sundays out of found materials: a piece of plywood, a 3-legged coffee table, a shipping pallet, and a window screen (you can see it behind Erin in the picture above). Tonight, our makeshift manger was lit from within by about 50 candles. At the time in the service when we light the handheld candles and sing Silent Night (a tradition I want to change next year… Silent Night is not even in the top 20 of Christmas songs), we invited people on the center aisle to come forward and light their candle from the Christ candle in the manger. It was a neat idea—people come to the manger to receive the light, but the overhead lights got turned a bit too low, and it was just a bit too dark, and the folks coming to the manger had to walk up and down 3 steps. Well, sure enough, one of my favorite people in the congregation lost his balance on the stairs, fell into a young woman, and almost knocked her into the flaming manger. THAT would have been a memorable Christmas Eve. Thank you God, that everyone was fine.

It’s been a good Advent and Christmas. Maybe next year we’ll do it again… but in the abandoned car lot and without Silent Night.

Individuals are Expendable

2024-12-20T17:59:00.007-05:00

The cost of individualism is individual expendability.

There are things that are hard to talk about and write about because they’re abstract. I apologize in advance for the incoherence. But I’m fixed on the human carnage I’ve met recently. A man, not yet 60, who moves in and out of the hospital because his body is failing due to alcoholism and other untreated physical and mental issues. He weeps for his mother who just died and the unreconciled grief between them. He has no home, no one is glad to see him. I’m thinking about a woman who came into the church looking for gas money, manic, talking a mile a minute, laughing, joking. After a few minutes in conversation, she, too, taking an abrupt turn, weeps. Something I can’t decipher about her boys. Her boys, she wants me to visit her boys. She can’t. But she wants them to know she loves them. Where? DeKalb County Jail. Her sons, 20 and 21, await trial for carjacking and murdering a DoorDash driver this summer.

These two people are at the end. There is nowhere else to go. No one wants them. No one else can hold their pain or fix it. Their suffering receives no consolation. I tend to believe that everyone should have a place to go for help. Everyone deserves care and love. But I meet so many people with no where to go. Long before they came to me, the collective “us” had abandoned them.

The larger framework I want to interrogate here is “individualism,” which I think about as a social norm that assumes the basic unit of morality, meaning, agency, and responsibility is the individual. “I/me/mine” feels like the only important and inviolable frame for thinking about American life. We are a nation of individuals. We made this bed, in a sense, through our nation’s evolution as a liberal democracy with a free market economic system. Both democracy and capitalism elevate the autonomy of the individual over any collective identity. We elevate the individual; and we let individuals wither, suffer, die.

There’s a weird phenomenon buried within American individualism. Individualism depends on collective actions to preserve and protect it. We don’t have a “state of nature” individualism. Ours is a highly structured individualism. Individual rights depend on a government that is committed to protecting rights by the application of the rule of law. Individual profit-seeking and taking is dependent on collective actions that create markets and police who are deployed to defend private property. Our individualism is by corporate agreement.

So, our “system” is an agreement. But increasingly, I feel the power imbalances. The agreement feels engineered by those who succeed. Those who, because of genes or, more likely, family wealth, can embrace the brutality of individualism. I’ve met so many wealthy families who buffet the failures of individuals in their family system by their wealth and power. These stories become family secrets. But in poor families, there’s nothing to buffet the inevitable failures. There’s lots of pain, there’s wounded people wounding one another, and finally, for so many people, the family itself goes away. There’s nothing.

What I’ve been thinking about and feeling lately is exactly how much this system of ours allows individuals to be expendable. What does it mean to live in a system that says it prioritizes individual flourishing, and asserts individual dignity, but only guarantees those fundamental rights to individuals with enough wealth to buffet their inevitable failures?

That is a rigged game, this “individualism.” It’s a moral offense. Our “us” has no room for the outcast, the failure, the disgraced.

Advent and Christmas are Amazing and Also Miserable

2024-12-10T11:37:00.002-05:00

I had a wonderful conversation with my local pastors group this morning over coffee. Four of us meet together weekly to share ideas and inspiration for the weekly rhythms of proclaiming "good news." I enjoy their company.

This week, we shared experiences of Advent and Christmas. One of my colleagues has a powerful interfaith relationship with Muslims and Jews and they take turns sharing worship together a few times during the year. My Presbyterian colleague always hosts on an Advent Sunday--it's a beautiful display of friendship and hospitality to welcome "strangers" during a holy season. He learned that after the service, a woman made a comment on a local Facebook group asking, "can someone point me to a church that doesn't let Muslims speak during Advent?" Oy.

It triggered a broader conversation about Christmas and Christmas traditions and how meaningful and unsettling they can be. I have become much more outspoken over the last few years about how much I dislike Christmas. Yes, it's the materialism and over-consumption that comes from living in a market society that has to manipulate our desires in order to remain viable. But I even resent church celebrations. They're too precious. One of my colleagues told a story about a long-held tradition at their church at Christmas where a local opera singer would show up on Christmas Eve and sing "O Holy Night" in a floor-length sequined ball gown.

It's not that traditions like that are "bad." Beautiful music is surely part of Christmas. Why am I so grumpy about that kind of thing?

There's surely a tension in the Christmas story between humility and glory. The young girl laboring on the straw surrounded by animals in a backwater town in the Roman Empire is the humility. The glory is the angels appearing to the shepherds proclaiming peace on earth and good will to all. The story manages to hold the glory and the humility in tension.

Most of our worship services on Christmas don't even aspire to the tension. They are too docile. Too safe. Too clean. I want to worship on Christmas Eve at midnight in an abandoned car lot. That might get us closer to the spirit of the event. Snug in our sanctuaries with our little candles never gets me all the way to the insane core of incarnation.

My hunger for provocative worship experiences makes me perpetually dissatisfied with Christmas Eve. I'm all for beauty. But Christmas Eve, of all nights, is not the time for being safe or docile. I want to feel the chill of the night, feel the precarity and vulnerability of birthing a baby into a stark, violent world. I want to see the impossibility of it all, and to wonder that THIS is how God chooses to arrive.

Why People Leave Church and What A Church Should Do

2024-12-04T16:42:00.003-05:00

I've written before in this blog about what it feels like to be a pastor at a time when people are abandoning religion. The shorthand is: it sucks, but there's also opportunity.

It sucks because it's stressful and painful. Budgets are always tight. Pastors hold a lot of anxiety. Churches have to downsize, lay people off, watch the congregation die off. It all feels lousy.

But there's also opportunity. I, for one, prayed for the end of Christendom, when the church wouldn't be "married" to the culture. Disentangling the mission of the church from mainstream American culture is a win for the church. But only if congregations and denominations are able to move with the changes and adapt our form to continue to connect with people in this new cultural moment.

There was an interesting radio show covering church decline on NPR today. One of the interesting take-aways for me is this nugget:

[For the majority, their reasons for leaving [church] are more mundane than you'd expect.

“Most people have left for really pedestrian reasons. Like, I moved; attendance was inconvenient; or, say, family change," Michael Graham, co-author of "The Great Dechurching" says.

The program is worth listening to, but his main point is that most of the conversation about de-churching focuses on theology--like "churches are too conservative" or "churches are too liberal" or "worship isn't exciting enough." But maybe church folks who care about the future should be focusing on much more practical matters.

It means church leaders can't necessarily build a model of church that depends on regular in-person church attendance (ie, "membership"). You CAN, however, build out tools that allow people to connect with your congregation outside of Sunday worship. Online worship. Podcasts. Livestreams. More and more, it feels like THIS is the new "capital campaign" building project. Building out capacities to connect with people who can not or will not be regular in-person attendees--but who still have deep spiritual lives that need tending by trained, compassionate clergy. This will mean smaller budgets, fewer staff, and fewer buildings. But maybe, ironically, more "engaged" participation.

A Good Sample of a Pastor’s Day

2024-11-19T08:08:00.001-05:00

Got up at 6, got the kids off to school, went for a 3 mile jog.

Hospital visit. I used to dread hospital visits. You just never know what you’re walking in to. What is the patient’s mood and prognosis? What is the family feeling? What is the pastor’s role? There’s been a trauma, and there’s always a lot to read in the room in terms of emotion in very little time. I’m not big on walking in, saying a prayer, and walking out. I spend maybe a little longer than most, trying to help sift through the emotional/spiritual reality in the room. I don’t dread visits anymore. I do dread the American healthcare “system.” Hospitals are generally terrible environments: sterile, soulless, confusing, and dehumanizing.

Staff meeting for 50 minutes. We meet on zoom and I work with the best staff in the world.

Bible study for 45 minutes, also on Zoom. We read from Jeremiah, whom I adore. So pessimistic, tinged with hope. My approach to Bible study is to try to get us all into the world of the text. To step inside it as a 3-dimensional space, to notice things, to ask questions about what we see, to observe how the text makes us feel. We usually have 6 or so people in Bible study. I wish we had 60. I love it.

Spent 30 minutes talking to the repairmen who came to fix the solar panels on the church roof. Every pastor becomes an armchair property manager. I know more about inverters than I ever expected.

An unhoused man dropped by to pick up his mail. He had used the church as an address during the summer. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it. We talked for 15 minutes—he told me about his struggle trying to get and keep work. Lots of entry level jobs have unreliable hours and schedules, which is complicated if you’re relying on public transportation or have to report to a shelter by a certain time in the evening.. He had walked 5 miles from Atlanta to get to the church. I promised him we would get him his mail. I also gave him a MARTA card so he could ride to his next destination. Dignity is hard when you don’t have reliable housing.

Talked for 20 minutes to our two wonderful “money changers”—two volunteers who come in to count the Sunday offering and deposit it in the bank. There are so many ways that unscrupulous people could steal money from a church. Churches have to build all kinds of financial safeguards—but most don’t. Pastors have to have our eyes on the church’s finances and financial management systems.

Filled out forms for benefits enrollment for our employees. As head of staff, I’m also the de facto HR rep. It makes me hate our healthcare system all the more. I had to call and ask for help filling out the forms because they were written in such bureaucratic healthcare-ese that I had no clue what they were asking. I felt very dumb. After 30 minutes, the forms were filled out and submitted.

Joined a zoom call in the late afternoon with pastors and therapists and LGBTQ organizers to talk about how to respond to the new presidential administration and the hostile climate it will create for people we love.

In the evening, I went to a city commission meeting to voice support for affordable housing. Decatur has become a rich town over the last 20 years. Affordable housing stock disappeared. The Decatur Housing Authority is trying to build more, but—surprise!—a local neighbors group has opposed it at every turn. My church has played a strong role in organizing pro-affordability policy, so I turn up at meetings when the opposition is planning something. Last night was great—only one opponent of the project spoke. About 10 people spoke in favor of the project. Organizing works!

Watched the Manning Cast of Monday Night Football while I washed dinner dishes. Went to bed at 10:15. A fair sample of the range of things a pastor does during a day.

The End of the World

2024-11-18T08:04:00.003-05:00

Trump’s election may or may not be the end of the world. We survived the first term, and by “we” I mean those of us he did not kill with his paranoid science-ignorant response to the pandemic.

This kind of language—about Trump bringing on the end of the world—seems hyperbolic to many people. But to others—trans kids, immigrants, and any human being who understands that climate change is already killing human beings by the tens of thousands every year—the “end of the world” is not hyperbolic. It’s daily reality. It’s the end of the world as we know it—the end of common sense, of democracy, of decency, of kindness, of safety, of trust that powerful people will act with wise judgment instead of selfish impulse.

The New Testament has a lot to say about the end of the world. The Gospels say that Jesus envisions it. Revelation is an extended dream about the end. Christians should be comfortable talking and thinking about “the end.” But we Christians get what the Bible says about the end of the world wrong. Completely wrong. Dead wrong.

“Apocalypse” is not the literal end of the world. It means an unveiling—a revealing of the true nature of a thing. It’s an epistemological experience. John’s vision in Revelation is an unveiling of the ultimate powerlessness of the Roman Empire. The empire will one day be overthrown. Its power is illegitimate, it will not stand.

But the sloppy mess that is Biblical literalism turns the apocalypse into a real—even hoped-for—experience. Some Christians even long for the end of the world and the unfathomable suffering that comes with it, because they believe they will be saved.

Naomi Klein, on a recent podcast, suggests that popular support for Trump is a manifestation of this kind of longing for apocalypse. Instead of facing the horrors of the world we’ve created, we opt for escapism. We turn to the demagogue, the emperor who parades in the nude, the idea that our nation is “exceptional” and has never done anything wrong and never will. We choose these falsehoods, Klein suggests, because we can’t bear to face a harder truth, and because we believe—falsely—that we will somehow survive the apocalypse, the great destruction.

The better reading of the Gospels and Revelation is that the power of oppression will, through love, one day be unveiled. The architecture of society and economic life, constructed in the logic of domination and extraction, will crumble under the gentle weight of unrelenting mercy. The biblical vision of apocalypse is not that some elect group will survive while others perish. The biblical vision is that justice, righteousness, mercy, and peace will prevail, and all flesh will see it together.

Day Off

2024-11-15T16:09:00.004-05:00

Fridays, if all goes well, are a day off. All hasn’t exactly gone well this week (there are still a bunch of things, like finishing Christmas Eve and Advent planning, that are undone).

But I am taking time for myself. I’m reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which everyone who is much smarter than me says is THE book describing how and why America has become “secular” and what that actually means. Taylor is a philosopher, and so in good philosopher form he’s really dense and makes a lot of leaps in his writing that I can’t follow. But the overall gist is great: we are “secular” because the way we think, associate, and ritualize, has changed from a collective, integrated worldview, to a worldview that largely supports individual meaning making. This transformation in the West, over centuries, has benefits and also drawbacks for human flourishing.

You don’t have to read Taylor. James Smith has a helpful little summary of A Secular Age that will give you the gist. But I think every pastor has to read Taylor and engage with his ideas. How do you know where to go if you don’t know where you are and how we got here?

I do like days off, to let my mind wander toward big things.

Homeless

2024-11-14T10:44:00.000-05:00

In a huge DeKalb County conference room this morning. There are a dozen elected and appointed leaders in the front, and about 100 community members in the audience. The subject is homelessness.

DeKalb County, where I’ve lived for 15 years, does a terrible job helping homeless people find stability. The meeting is designed to bring stakeholders together to plan for a different, better future. I’m here because our church had a difficult experience hosting a free fridge on our campus; the fridge welcomed all people, including unhoused people, to get something to eat, but those folks had nowhere else to go and ended up living on the church’s campus. Neighbors got pissed. The county offered no coherent assistance, no shelter, no responsive mental health supports for people in crisis.

People lose their homes all the time—it’s normal. But being homeless is a societal choice. We choose it when there is no municipal housing strategy and no coherent continuum of care.

Homelessness is a housing problem. The problem is plain: the market sucks at providing housing, especially for people with low incomes. The private housing market is great at providing housing for people at higher incomes—which is defensible from a money-making perspective, but indefensible from a moral perspective. The public sector has to be involved to stimulate, incentivize, and build housing for people who make $70K a year and less. DeKalb County is finally developing a housing plan to create a coherent county-wide housing plan. It has to get better. It can’t get worse.

The Continuum of Care is the HUD-designated entity that provides the bulk of funding for homeless services. In DeKalb County, the CoC isn’t coherent—they parcel out dollars with no strategy.

Churches always have and always will have a role in addressing homelessness. We care, and a bureaucratic response to human suffering without sincere love and care for the human beings involved is brutality. But we churches don’t have the money to create housing or the expertise to provide the case management and health services that people need to move from instability to stability.

Homelessness a symptom of a larger problem: we live in a society in which it is easy to fall into poverty and punishing to actually be poor. There is a generalized tolerance for a society structured like this. It could be different. It should be different. Blessed are you who are poor. Let’s make a county, structurally, that reflects that value.

Well...

2024-11-12T14:41:00.002-05:00

...here we go.

I haven't written regularly on here in years, but it's time. With Trump coming back into power, and with a certain section of Christianity embracing him, I'm going back to using this digital space to record what I do as a pastor each day. I'd like this space to show, in an unpretentious way, to any who care, what "liberal" Christianity looks like on a granular level. What does a pastor think about? How does following Jesus affect my life? What really happens in our church? I'll touch on all of that.

This last week has been hard. I dislike Trump intensely. Many in our congregation of 350+ feel similarly. Every conversation I've had this past week begins, "how are you handling the weight of all of this?" Folks are worried, angry, searching, sad.

The church goes on, regardless of the outcome of any election. Now, however, as part of the liberal church, I feel more and more out of alignment with the culture. I described it yesterday to a colleague as a tectonic shift in our location in the Niebuhrian "Christ and Culture" scale--from mainline Protestantism's traditional perch in "Christ Transforming Culture" to something more like "paradox" or even "against" culture. Liberal Protestants may need to re-read Hauerwas' Resident Aliens, or Bonhoeffer's Life Together for our model of the future of our churches.

Yesterday was still a good day of ministry.

A breakfast meeting furthered a significant institutional partnership in Decatur that I've been nurturing for 3 years. It was so delightful to see a long-range agreement begin to take shape. I'm so excited for these partners to come together! Hopefully there will be more news to announce soon.
Wonderful supervision conversation with our seminary intern. He's super talented. Our conversation moved from preaching, to how to tend to the relationship with the immigrant congregation housed in our church--how to be supportive without being paternalistic, to what is "spiritual formation?" I love that last question. We used to think spiritual formation was about practices--adding a little prayer to your life or maybe some Lenten fasting to go along with Sunday worship, as though that sprinkling were enough to "form" a disciple of Jesus. So wrong. We are literally being formed all day every day. Our phones form us, the economy forms us, housing patterns form us, schools form us, work forms us, cultural norms form us--all in ways that be profoundly disorienting and contradictory to the way of Jesus. The church is losing the human and moral/spiritual formation game, every damn day. Don't know what the answer is.
Had staff meeting with our wonderful, talented staff. We talked about whether it is OK for me to come out so strongly against Trump--not Republicans, but Trump the person. We talked about caring for ourselves and our own spirits as we seek to care for our congregation.
Zoom Bible study led by our seminary intern on Isaiah 6. Great text. "Send me," and "I am a person of unclean lips!" Remind me to tell you the story of what happened when I heard that line read and interpreted by a lesbian--changed the way I think about that whole story and what it means.
Met with a terrific architect to map out details for a sanctuary renovation. Chairs, baby!
At night, hanging out outside my son's music lesson, I ran into Michael, an unhoused friend. I've helped him so much over the years, but he's never been able to climb out from under alcoholism. He was walking down the sidewalk, in a t-shirt with no shoes on. He had just left the hospital--he has major health issues. I took him over to the church to find a sweatshirt and coat to wear and I couldn't find him any shoes. I took mine off and tried to get them on his feet, but they were 1/2 size too small--his feet are so painful, he couldn't squeeze into them. There was no place to take him at 7PM--no shelter would welcome him at that time of night. I gave him cash, told him to get shoes and food at Walmart. I hope he made it to the MARTA to stay warm.