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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

There is a phrase that my Type-A, rules-following personality simply hates to utter: “We CAN make an exception.” I loathe it. It is something I have to say after a deadline has come and gone for a retreat and someone wants to sign up two days before we leave. I want to say no. I…

This post has made its way around facebook several times, and I figure that it is better to try and write a response with a (hopefully) concise blog post than to fill up everybody’s facebook comments with rambling stream-of-thought paragraphs. So here it goes: nitpicking For the most part, this blog has good points. Or,…

When I was in college, I had the general idea that there was no passage of scripture that I couldn’t interpret. After all, I was attending THE Moody Bible Institute. I was taught all the methods that I would need to look at any part of scripture, find relevant commentaries, do my research, and come…

When I was in college, I spent two summers interning under the same youth pastor. I learned a lot during those two 3 month periods, but there is one memory that particularly sticks out: one day, as he faced the complications that come with balancing the competing demands of his ministry and family life (as…

I must admit, I am something of an idealist. My picture of an ideal world is one in which everybody works hard, makes enough money, and no one goes hungry. Wealth disparity saddens me; not because I despise the rich or think that they are bad for having made money, but because of the seeming…