This month I am delighted to paired with Lilith Dorsey of the Pagan Channel here on Patheos. Each Monday through October will be will reflecting on how we think of and honor our ancestors. We do this from our own embeddedness, each seeking to share in freedom the beauty of our traditions. Then later that week we will reflect on one’s another’s musing. This past Monday we both posted on the way our tradition understood art in relation to our... Read more

Christianity is changing because Christendom is dying. Europe became a post-Christian reality in the 20th century. America is poised to take that same path in the 21st century. This is not a lamentable thing but a good thing. Christendom, that unclean marriage of church and state, of the gospel with culture, has been tried and found lacking for over 1,700 years. Today we are farther removed in time from Jesus than Jesus was from Abraham. In fact I would suggest... Read more

For the next four Mondays I will be writing a brief post in conjunction with Lilith Dorsey over at the Pagan Channel (Patheos). A request was sent out by the editor of that channel seeking a dialogue between writers of the Pagan and Christian channels and while there may be others, Lilith and I will each be posting on Mondays and then mid-week responding to one another’s posts. We have been asked to look at the roles of our ancestors.... Read more

When I was a little boy I believed in magic. I was 7 or 8 years old when I read Madeline L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time. I was 10 years old when I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I had a most vivid imagination and played with my best friend Barry Lloyd in a make-believe world almost every day. Every tree was a fortress, every wild place a new planet. The world was fraught with possibilities. Raised Roman Catholic,... Read more

Yesterday marked the end of my first month of blogging on Patheos. The goal was to have 25,000 readers of my posts for the month (that’s cumulative readers of all my posts). I came in with 23, 405. Came. Up. Short. Traveling around the UK and Ireland I am often apologized to by my hosts for the “low turnouts” to my speaking engagements. I say the same thing to everybody. Numbers don’t matter. If one person shows up, it’s party... Read more

I have traveled in many church traditions and read in many more. Looking back I can say that no matter where I have traveled I have learned something. For me, life is a constant learning experience. Every group I speak with, every person I meet teaches me something new. I have sought to integrate what I have learned from each day into each week, each week into each month and each month into each year. Together the years constitute my... Read more

There is a video of US Marines worshipping together that has now gone viral. They are singing a worship song titled “In the Days of Elijah.” I am almost at a loss for words when it comes to a video like this. When I suggested on my Facebook Page that these Marines could not be worshipping the Living Lord Jesus but were instead valorizing the ‘Ba’al Jesus’ I was taken to task for ‘disrespecting our men and women in uniform.’... Read more

In theology there is a term that is used occasionally when it comes to discussing God: apophatic. This term indicates that we know God in negation, that is, when we make a claim about God we must also say that that claim is not true, God is higher than that. It is a way of saying that language cannot contain God. The classic texts for this come from the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the late fifth century and have had a... Read more

This was written for Holy Thursday this past April: Think of all the various elements that make up a Passover meal and then ask yourself how important is it that Jesus did not compare himself to the Passover lamb? In Matthew, Mark and Luke, it would appear that Jesus is celebrating a Passover meal. At least the text implies that. John’s gospel has no such indicators. That is because in John’s Gospel the Passover has not yet been celebrated (18:28).... Read more

I had actually started a blog on exactly this topic but my friend Rob Grayson did such a bang-up job, it now saves me the trouble of having to write it! Read more