Balancing Love and Responsibility
The Village Voice has a response article making its way around the internet this week. The piece is a help column by Andrew W.K. in a reoccurring column called Ask Andrew W.K. On August 6, the...
View Article“You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like Me”: On Robin Williams, Suicide, Ultimate...
*TRIGGER WARNINGS* suicide, self-harm, depression Over this past month, prompted by Ramadan, I've been thinking about what it means to be a good person in the world. It's way harder than it seems, and...
View Article“You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like Me”: On Robin Williams, Suicide, Ultimate...
In reflecting on Robin Williams's death, a conversation I had with a friend came to mind from a couple of weeks ago. I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine at work, when he mentioned...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Growing a string of PERLs: A report from the first year of Philadelphia...
Today’s emerging religious leaders are hungry to build relationships with each other, work shoulder to shoulder for social justice, and learn the skills of interfaith dialogue and collaboration that...
View ArticleWelcoming the Secular: A Call to Both Sides
Last week I attended the North American Interfaith Network’s annual conference in Detroit, MI. After four days of panels, community excursions, and intensive networking I returned home exhausted but...
View ArticleGod Weeps and God Delights
Rev. Nancy Taylor, senior minister of Old South Church in Boston, recently wrote a reflection for the United Church of Christ’s Still Speaking Daily Devotionals. In it, she addresses the seemingly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Growing a string of PERLs: A report from the first year of Philadelphia...
Bringing in principles informed by my work in Faith-Based Community Organizing I entered the first full year of Philadelphia Emerging Religious Leaders (PERL) with the goal of building the small...
View ArticleTheology as a Life Saver
In one of Rumi’s writings, a scholar in grammar asks a boatman for a ride on his boat. Once settled aboard, he asks the boatman: “Do you know the science of grammar?” The boatman replies; “no, I...
View ArticleOverabundance
As autumn settles into the trees, changing bright green to the yellow, orange, and red rainbow of fall, I always get a little sad. Summer is by far my favorite season, all heat and sun, with air so...
View ArticleOur Fine Feathered Friends
I've never been much of a wildlife enthusiast, mainly because viewing wildlife entails going outside, and outside is where the things that make me sneeze live. (Note: Indoors is the other place where...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where All Ways Meet
I’ve been finishing up a field education placement at the Waysmeet Center, the United Campus Ministry to the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Waysmeet strives to be an interfaith or multifaith...
View ArticleSame-Sex Marriage and Slippery Slopes
In his dissent to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts offers a familiar 'slippery slope' argument: "Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective...
View ArticleOn Dignity, Morality, and Responsibility: The Effect of Obergefell vs. Hodges
This summer has been full of some pretty amazing and terrifying historic moments, and the Supreme Court decisions definitely made the list for me. As someone who finds the judicial process fascinating,...
View Article“Right View” and Interfaith Dialogue
One “fold” on the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path toward enlightenment is Right View. “Right view” is the skill of dissolving interpretations in favor of drawing closer to the reality of the world....
View ArticleWho Sets the Table? White-Christian Dominance of Interfaith Gatherings
My home church recently hosted a summer-long series of guest speakers under the theme “Expanding Our Faith.” Eager to gain insights from other religious traditions, we invited a rabbi, an imam, a Zen...
View ArticleThe Consistent Life Ethic in U.S. Catholic Discourse: Planned Parenthood,...
In high school, I was the President of the Pro-Life Club for a year. It seemed like a completely natural fit for me—being in a leadership role on such a divisive political and moral issue appealed to...
View Article5 Things I Never Knew About People With Developmental Disabilities Until I...
All views expressed in this post are my own and are written separately from community life in L’Arche International. In C.S. Lewis’s classic novel The Horse and His Boy, Lewis pens this classic quote:...
View ArticleStop Sympathizing and Start Supporting: A Close Look at What Moves Us to...
We drive down a dusty, overgrown mountain road, and I wonder how the low clearance between my four-cylinder rental’s undercarriage and the uneven mounds of earth have not scraped the oil pan from my...
View ArticleWedding Cakes and Religious Pluralism
One of the first religious experiences I had as a teenager seeking a spiritual teenager was attending a Reform Jewish temple in St. Joseph, Missouri. The temple’s members were mainly elderly people,...
View ArticleStop Sympathizing and Start Supporting: A Close Look at What Moves us to...
If you read Part 1 of this article, you have become acquainted with the members of the Rural Women’s Movement, many of them unmarried mothers who participate in my research project on the struggles,...
View Article
