Since 1997, I have participated regularly in unprogrammed Quaker worship. After 34 years of attending churches with lots of singing and preaching, it was deeply purifying to drop all that external spectacle and simply dedicate myself to listening as deeply as possible for the truth to reveal itself within me. Many years before this, I’d […]
Micah Bales recently blogged about “Why The Church is Not And Will Not Be Revolutionary.” He writes: If Jesus isn’t a rebel, but rather the Authority, where does that leave us? We’re not radicals or dissidents. We’re loyalists. In the midst of a darkened and confused rebellion, we remember who the king is. The kingdom […]
Beginning last December, I began a series on my Radical Righteous Love podcast entitled, “The Peoples Communist Bible Study” which was planned to go through the Gospel of Luke into the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles and answer the question, “was Jesus a proto-communist?” I was joined each week by my supportive […]
PANDEAISM is a term constructed thus: PAN = ALL DEA = GODDESS ISM = PHILOSOPHY All being is divine or within divinity/god/dess. This infinite being has generated numberless finite transformative conscious beings. Pandeaism perceives all beings as part of Divinity/God/dess, and some finite beings/characters manifest extraordinary transformative divinity in their lives. The Chinese Bodhisattva Kwan […]
For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on two poles of a larger divide within our contemporary religious culture on the issue of a biblical economic ethic. On the one side we have the “pro-capitalist” discourse that roots itself on a individualist interpretation of the seventh (or eighth) commandment “thou shalt not steal,” and […]
The first “God” I encountered was a hellfire Judge who sounded a lot like my Pentecostal preacher father. Though I have done years of counseling, meditation, and theological reflection to heal my traumatic childhood, “God” is still a difficult Name. I say “Name” not being, person, or label. God with a capital G is a […]
Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me. John Lennon In my teen years there was a popular Christian song, “Jesus is the Answer / For the world today.” But, in my thirties Jesus became a Question for me. As a Pentecostal […]
(I apologize in advance at just how ?#(&!<$ crazy the following will read.) When holiday theology starts to irritate against my deconversion stasis, I turn to mysticism. I’m not kidding here. At least not obviously so. I aspire to become one with both the literalists and the atheists who are both right and both […]
An integrative ministry will be simultaneously embodied, emotionally powerful, relationally bonded, communally transformative, dynamically worldly, socially prophetic, and ecologically holistic.
There’s an old left-wing quip that runs “if you aren’t an anarchist in your twenties, you have no heart, and if you aren’t a socialist in your thirties you have no brain.” A more well-known variant puts the terms “liberal” and conservative” in the opposed positions corresponding to immaturity and maturity. Unitarian minister and social […]
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