• Systems of Death and the Subversive Seed (John 12:24)

    Watercolor from John Jay Alvaro Watch it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/arGhrrsFTxc The Subversive SeedThis week, we saw the shooting of 8 individuals, 6 were Asian-Americans reminding us again of the ongoing and increased racism Asian-Americans and other communities of color have faced in the last year. Maybe unsurprisingly at this point: it was done by a man…

  • Reading the Bible with Empathy

    Reading the Bible with Empathy – A Methodology This method is about seeking to enter into the biblical text imaginatively. It seeks to see various experiences and contexts from the character’s point of view, opening up more variety to the interpretations, but also a liberatory framework because these texts were – in most instances –…

  • Thinking Core Stories

    Core Stories To state the obvious: all organizations have life cycles. That is true whether we are thinking about faith communities, businesses, non-profits, schools, etc. We could think of organizations as a collected and sustained series of stories over time. It might be easier to think about the role of stories in our personal lives…

  • A New Kind of Nursery of Truth – Part 3

    This is the third of a three-part series on whether or not Quakers can be “Publishers of Truth” today. In this series I want to talk about how I think early Quakers understood what it meant to be “publishers of truth” in earlier years (Part 1), just a couple challenges we face when it comes…

  • Moving Into Interfaith Leadership

    I recently read Eboo Patel’s new book, Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (2016). I’d recommend it to any student looking to go into the field of interfaith work, or any minister or religious leader trying to find ways to reorient their spiritual work in this changing religious landscape. Patel’s vision is timely and much-needed. Given the…