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If you are around conservatives enough, you‘ll often hear some variation on this theme: The family is the building block of society. Or, in religious circles you might hear that the family (by this we mean the nuclear family of mother, father, and children) is like a little church. It comes up in politics, in…

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In Ohio public schools (at least in the late 90s), there were a series of tests you had to pass at the end of the Eighth grade. I wasn’t worried about showing competency in math or English, but I was worried about social studies, or as the test was called: “citizenship.” I had just moved…

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I can’t do a good job of assessing how national policies that isolate our country from the rest of the world will affect our economy, safety, or general prosperity. I have opinions on them, but it’s not my area of expertise. I can make an argument for what that kind of a mentality looks like…

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In the last few days, my social media feeds are filled with sadness, anxiety, and fear. And one of the most common responses I see to the grief or in response to the grieving that many are going through after Trump’s election sounds something like this: Don’t worry. Trump isn’t even president until January. And…

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My students love Harry Potter. Just recently, a sophomore asked (out of the blue) about how the time-turner plot in the third book of the series could possibly work out. With absolutely no hesitation, one student started to explain how it worked, while another quickly pulled out her iPod so she could play the relevant…

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This is the text from a sermon I preached on November 11th, 2012 – the first Sunday after Barack Obama’s second election victory. I think I might word things a little differently now (I think how we implement change via government requires a bit more nuance than what I said), but someone shared with me…

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Last Fall, after preaching a sermon in which I raised some concerns I have with how the church treats immigrants, in what felt like a relatively surreal twist of fate to me, a parishioner set up a meeting between me and my Congressman so I could voice some of my concerns to my representative. The…

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When I was in the seventh grade, I was over at my friend Aaron’s house. Aaron was a couple years older than me, and so by definition was cooler than me. Just before I left, he showed me a CD he just got: Ghoti Hook’s Sumo Surprise. It was my first introduction to punk music…

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In watching and thinking about another election cycle, I’ve recently found myself in an interesting conundrum. I see lots and lots of commentary from friends and acquaintances on Facebook, and because of the circles I run in there is a word that gets thrown around that I am supposed to identify with, but I can’t.…

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I may have mentioned it a few times in other posts, but I want to write a bit about what is becoming my dominant metaphor when I think about the life stage of the people I work with the most: adolescents. What adolescence is can me a tricky thing to talk about. It’s that developmental…

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