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Jun 29

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On Signaling Virtue and Practicing Righteousness

Over the last number of years I’ve reflected often about how we inhabit this shared space that is the Internet. The ability to interact online is a marvelous gift and one that, as someone who has been blogging for nearly a decade, I am immensely appreciative of. But to the surprise of precisely no one who has spent more than five minutes online, the shared spaces of our online discourse can also be profoundly uninspiring in countless ways. See any comment section anywhere. The human capacity for coarse vulgarity, tribalistic stupidity and willful misunderstanding and misrepresentation is apparently limitless.

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Jun 22

Forgive Us Our Sins

The prayer book I use for Ordinary Time operates on a four-week cycle of prayers, beginning with a daily movement through the sentences of the Lord’s Prayer—the words given by Jesus in response to a request as simple as it was (and is) drenched in desperate need: “Teach us to pray.” This morning’s sentence was a very timely one: Forgive us our sins. Timely because, well, I can’t really think of a time when I don’t need to forgive or to be forgiven.  Read more

Jun 18

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On the Occasion of Your Fifteenth Birthday

A rambling letter to my fifteen-year-old twins “composed” (i.e., dictated to myself on my phone) during a morning walk on this the day of their birth.

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Hi kids,

I apologize if this seems overdramatic or sentimental or nauseating or whatever. It’s been fifteen years since we brought you two beautiful little creatures home from the hospital and a lot of weird things can happen to adults’ brains over the course of fifteen years, especially when they’ve been fundamentally altered by a love as irrational as that of the love that a parent has for a child. I hope you can indulge me a little. Read more

Jun 17

“The Impeded Stream is the One That Sings”

Pope Francis got himself in trouble today for suggesting that the “great majority” of Catholic marriages being celebrated today are “invalid” because couples do not fully appreciate that they are making a lifetime commitment. The fact that this statement would draw criticism is puzzling, on the face of it, because who would dispute this after even a cursory glance at the world we live in? Apparently conservative critics objected to his use of the word “invalid.” Perhaps they think that this word will provide a loophole for those seeking to escape loveless marriages. At any rate, canon lawyers and media spin artists quickly went to work on words like “invalid” and “great majority,” seeking to downplay or reframe or somehow mitigate the pope’s comments and the ways in which they might be misconstrued. Read more

Jun 14

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The Right Questions

There’s a scene in Canadian author David Adams Richards’ latest novel, Principles to Live By where John Delano, a washed up police officer trying to get back in the game, is asked by a colleague why he doesn’t have much use for school. Delano responds thus:

Oh, I don’t know—let’s just say that those who know all the answers are often the ones never able to ask the right questions.

A simple enough statement, right? But a profound and instructive one, also. At least so it seems to me. As someone who has spent nearly ten years blogging and interacting online with people on both ends of liberal-conservative spectrum, as someone who has been a pastor for nearly eight years and regularly finds himself in dialogue with people holding views that cross the theological spectrum, this statement rings true. Read more

Jun 13

Everything Terrible

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

I have the above quote from the poet Ranier Maria Rilke taped to my office wall just off to the right of my desk. I look at it often, particularly when “everything terrible” makes its inevitable appearance. Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino. And now, Orlando. Another scarcely comprehensible act of murderous hatred in response to difference. Another convenient scapegoat located.  On and on, everything terrible goes. Read more

Jun 8

30 Comments

Warning Signs

I was warned, this afternoon. Me and a few hundred others who had gathered for a funeral. Me and a few hundred others who sat, silently, grimly, in a cavernous and spare sanctuary while a stern man in a black suit stood in an elevated pulpit and admonished us with grave fingers wagging. I was warned that death was coming for me and unless I renounced the ways of the devil and repented of my worldly pride and attachments, that my fate would be a fiery and tortuous one. I was told that there was nothing good in me and that I could never stand before the righteous judge of the earth. I was told that God has his elect and we must never question God’s ways. I was warned to keep watch for the temptations of Satan because Satan likes to provoke criticisms and doubts during times of death. Read more

Jun 3

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Friday Miscellany

A bit of a grab-bag of unfinished thoughts, provocations, and observations collected over the past week…

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I spent my morning commute listening to the first few minutes of this week’s episode of On Being. The episode was an interview with Jonathan Haidt and Melvin Konner and had the delightfully breezy title: “Capitalism and Moral Evolution: A Civil Provocation.” I’ve not yet finished the episode, but I was struck by one line that I heard this morning:

As people become richer and safer, their values change.

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