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It was carved with hand tools on a rough slab of native red rock: “Marcelito L. Baca – murio a la edad de 17 dias (died at the age of 17 days) – 1919”. It was planted …

On a stony trail through the Sinai wastes
A little family headed south
Father, mother, little babe
A burdened donkey, head drooped down

May you be gifts to those you see
Better than presents under a tree

This past Saturday night, my wife Roberta and I stood with a group of people on Hollywood Boulevard, holding flickering candles. Passers-by might have assumed we were Christmas caroling. But we were holding a vigil for the …

(From a sermon I gave at Mt Hollywood Congregational Church on 12/2, the first Sunday of Advent.) On one seemingly ordinary day over 2000 years ago, a seemingly ordinary girl had an extraordinary rebirth. Mary abruptly experienced …

May we be enraptured
By overshadowing Love;
May our souls magnify the Lord
Through our widening eyes,

((My wife Roberta and I hope that THIS IS MY SONG will be sung at Obama’s 2nd inauguration in January. It’s “a song of peace for their land and for mine” – just the message America needs …

A baby waits in a dark, warm womb
Lulled by the sway of a donkey’s walk

I am what comes before sand and sandstone
Chickens and eggs.
I am the unproven truth
On which all proofs depend.

What’s a promise worth, any more? Surely one of the most peculiar phenomena in America’s peculiar politics has been Grover Nordquist’s no-tax-increase pledge. It was signed solemnly by countless Republican politicians over the last couple of decades. …

English and Spanish verses of the song traditionally sung as Joseph and Mary search for shelter.

When Juan Diego spread out his tunic
Carmine roses cascaded before the bishop

When one comes in a never-uttered name
God wins the glory for all that is done:
It’s in hoping for what cannot be claimed
That every inch of justice is won.

One day, several years ago, I took our dog Kai for a walk. Just outside our home in Mill Valley, California, next to our steep driveway, was a flume where water ran in the rainy season. Halfway …

Christianity follows the humble faith of an empty man. So how did we Christians become so full of ourselves? It’s time to empty ourselves of the belief that our religion is better than others.

Dear One, closer to us than our own hearts, farther from us than the most distant star, you are beyond naming.

Richard Mourdock crashed his dogma into the wall of logic. He totaled his belief system with one elegantly absurd utterance. Now would be a good time for him to get a new religion, and a new political philosophy to go with it.

Simone Weil was a Jewish philosopher from France who was hungry for God, and found God through Christianity – even though she never became a Christian…For her, being hungry for God was the way to have God. Yearning for God was her experience of God.

I offer here a categorization and listing of ways that people think about God. I offer this list in order to stimulate my own thinking, and hopefully yours, about the tremendous variety of ways that people have tried to define or begin to comprehend Ultimate Reality.

New words to the hymn tune “For All the Saints”…

For Whitehead and Hartshorne, the indeterminacy of subatomic events suggests that freedom, and the creativity that flows from it, are ubiquitous in the universe. Even electrons make choices. According to process thought, we’re so free that even God can’t know the future, since all entities have the God-given ability to behave unpredictably.

This past Sunday in worship we handed out Soulful Travel Kits to everyone who came.

Isaiah, the prophet, who said “… seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1: 17) This passage is a key to the whole scripture; It’s what led Jesus to say three times to his disciple Peter, after Jesus’ resurrection: if you love me, feed my sheep. All my sheep.

I like to think that my job at our Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California is to facilitate the experience of goosebumps, when students discover how all things fit together into the Holy Whole. Sometimes, of course, religion itself gets in the way of this experience. Denial of science and common sense by dogmatic theology is a sure way to dull the kind of glow that illuminated Nicolas of Cusa’s face in 1464, and prevent the kind of tingle that went up my back in calculus class in 1975. Happily, within religion there are cures to be found for religion’s diseases.

I think the problem is exactly the opposite of the one Romney suggests. Americans aren’t as dependent on their government as they should be. If Tom Paine’s plan had prevailed in 1797, if the principle of universal income had become integral to the culture of this country from its founding, a whole range of problems we suffer in America today would not
exist.

When I want to get under the surface of things, I re-read the “proverbios” of the early 20th c. Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, and those of the later 20th c. Argentine poet, Antonio Porchia. Both men lived simply, loved deeply, and are cherished still as poets in their respective homelands.

I hope it will be a long time from now; I am grateful to be occupying this body today. But when you see this body lying before you in your gross anatomy lab, don’t call it mine. It will be for you, and for all the patients you will serve in your career as a doctor. Cut this body open with deep reverence, not for me, but for the living people whose bodies you will work to heal. My experience of eternal life during the process of my death will transcend this body completely.

“….seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1: 17) Here’s how I translate this biblical urging into the way I will vote in November: 1. The passage of the Affordable Health Care …

Wandering in the desert cleanses my soul of hubris. It puts me in my puny place in the cosmos. It’s bigger than I am, bigger than we are. A hike in the desert is a walk on the “via negativa”. Its vistas sweep away all that obscures the divine, so that God, though always near, seems nearer.

It’s the myth of countless Westerns of yesterday, the myth of the formulaic action-hero movies of today. It’s as American as Clint Eastwood. It’s as American as Captain America. And it’s proof that there is no such thing as the lone gunman. Contrary to the statements of the police and the politicians, the man who walked into a Sikh temple and shot several people dead did not act by himself. A nation of believers in this myth was right behind him.

“Contemplative Pedagogy” – a high-falutin’ term, no? In low-falutin’ language, it’s about using meditation to help people learn.

We worship and adore God,
source, essence, and aim of all things,
spirit that enlivens all beings.

Ehrenreich’s exploration of mind-over-matter thinking, the “prosperity gospel”, “The Secret”, and “positive psychology” led her into a study of American religious history. She concluded that this so-called New Thought movement appropriated one painful feature of the theology it meant to replace: guilt.

Wandering, I stumbled upon my purpose,
Adrift, I made port,
Unbidden, love arrived,
Asleep, I learned my lesson,
In silence, notes danced across my score,
Dreaming, my problems solved themselves.

Timely song from the collaboration of Jim Burklo and the late, amazing Lisa Atkinson.

You are a jar of water. The Christ is turning you into wine right now. You don’t know how. I don’t know how. I daresay Jesus didn’t know how either. Stuff is going on in that jar of yours that nobody can explain.