All Saints’ Day, Grief and Gratitude

Yesterday’s All Saints’ Day service invited us remember and give thanks for people whose deaths have brought us grief and invited us to find, in Jesus, comfort, reassurance, and love. Grief is, to say the least, complex. It keeps close company with other strong...

Better Together

Several years ago (July-August 1999), the magazine Fast Company ran a brief sidebar article that suggested people needed to create for themselves “an anti-bummer squad”–a team of friends and mentors—who would help in low times: “When you’re feeling uncreative,...

Reminding myself about politics

The air is thick with anxiety these days: many people are tense, on edge, and agitated. I am sure that the ongoing economic uncertainty is part of it. The news about the economy, especially about employment, isn’t solid and positive enough to give people durable hope...

Questions about Faith

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to evaluate the quality of one’s beliefs. What questions do we need to ask about the faith we hold and which holds us? How do we go about taking stock of our faith’s ability to make sense out of life, to guide the ways we live, and...

When Indifference Strikes

Novelist Walker Percy once said that his greatest fear for America was not that the nation would be defeated by some external enemy but by “weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.” I have that concern not just for...

Not “more” but “beyond and within”

Catholic priest Ronald Rollheieser says that there is, in all of us, “an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache.” He also believes, and I...

How expansive?

When I was five or six years old, my Sunday School teacher suggested I memorize John 3:16. I did as she suggested and committed that familiar verse to memory (in the King James Version, the “approved” version in the church I attended): “For God so loved the world,...

Rest

“Busy and tired.” That’s how many of us describe ourselves. Harried, hassled, hurried. Tapped-out, stressed-out, and burned-out. Overbooked. Overworked. Overcommitted. Overwhelmed. Busy and tired. David Steindl-Rast has reminded us that the Chinese...

Good News not Good Views

We live in a time of upheaval and confusion. The world doesn’t look like it used to look. We wrestle with bewildering questions and deal with threatening issues. Rock-solid certainties have eroded before our eyes. Anxious for ourselves and afraid for our children, we...

Beyond dualisms and stereotypes

Journalist, actor and humorist Robert Benchley once said: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” These days, almost everyone does. We seem addicted to dualistic and...