There is a reason every spiritual tradition on earth invented the congregation. Not the building. Not the institution. The gathering — the intentional assembly of people who have decided, against all the considerable pressures of private life, to show up in the same…
It does not begin at the school. That is the first thing to understand, and the hardest, because the school is where the cameras are. The school is where the names get read aloud at vigils, where the flowers are left at the…
There is a conversation that happens in faith communities all over America, in fellowship halls and pastoral offices and parking lots after services, that almost never gets said out loud. It is the conversation about the household where something is wrong. Where the…
The Luminal Moment Every tradition that has ever taken the sacred seriously has understood that certain objects require a threshold. The Torah scroll is wrapped in cloth, bound, and returned to the ark. The altar is railed off from the nave. The medicine…
Apr
22
Betting against the ones you love What the odds of gun ownership reveal about what we hold sacred
Americans love a bet. We wager over a trillion dollars a year on sports alone — not because we don’t understand odds, but because we believe, in that electric moment before the game, that we just might be the exception. The underdog wins.…
In the quiet corners of the St. Croix River valley, we often talk about stewardship—of the land, the river, and our community. But there is a growing disconnect in our national stewardship of public safety. Today, the Entangity Daily News proposes a technical…
When I was a young man, the rules of walking down a sidewalk were simple and rooted in a quiet kind of care. I was taught that a man should always walk on the outside—between the road and the woman he was with.…
Apr
15
What Would Luther Do?
A practical, realistic, doable response to the few who divide the many. Luther was not an idealist. He was famously, almost stubbornly, realistic about human nature. He did not believe the world could be perfected. He believed it could be tended — the way a…
In a town not too loud, not too wide,Where porches creak and neighbors wave with pride,The triplets sat with cocoa one bright day—When a knock at the door pulled them away. There stood the Chief, hat tipped just so,With eyes that were kind……
A message for anyone who feels like they’re sinking down There is a moment Robert Johnson captured in three minutes of scratchy 1936 recording that may be the most honest description of a certain kind of pain ever committed to music. He called…