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Most churches invite people to their church programs in their buildings, and with the space and time they don’t use, they rent to outside groups.

The people of Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church in Portland decided to turn that model on its head – and they created a vibrant community in the process.

I want the coolness that comes from staring at what I call a juniper tree until it stops fitting my definitions and begins to reveal itself to me on its own terms. I want the coolness that comes from taking time to stare at a little desert flower crystallizing into existence out of volcanic sand. I want the kind of coolness that comes from taking the time to appreciate my cool siblings and my cool 88-year-old Dad here in Oregon. Letting them be who they are, as they are, and not just as I might categorize them based on our family history.

American democracy is not well. And the Trump presidency is as much a symptom as a cause of the disease.

Many Americans, especially young ones, distrust organized anything: religions, governments, and corporations. Relentless media exposure of scandalous behavior by public figures has discredited the organizations these leaders represent. People question whether any institution can be counted upon to serve the common good. Levels of voter participation, particularly in down-ballot races, is abysmally low. Fewer Americans identify with the political parties. The

Here is a list of rules formulated decades ago by the legendary social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport, as abridged by the philosopher, Daniel Dennett:

“How to compose a successful critical commentary”

  When I was thirteen years old, in 1966, my family moved from a small midwestern town to Santa Cruz, California. It was the first Summer of Love. I came from a star, I came very far, …

I hope that the WooDyne Teapot Satellite makes it into space, in order to stimulate a public conversation about the natural nature of God. As Russell’s teapot moves from the invisible to the visible, so may our concept of God move from empirically-unsupportable supernaturalism to the undeniable reality of reality itself.

Each spring break, I lead a group of University of Southern California students down to “baja Arizona” for a week to experience the humanitarian realities along the US side of the border with Mexico. We meet with progressive Christian activists – many of whom have been working for decades to prevent migrant deaths, assist migrants with practical help and legal representation, and advocate for legislative and administrative reform of our broken US immigration system.

Religious freedom is alive and well in America. Our nation shelters a vast and vibrant marketplace of theological ideas and spiritual practices. If there is a problem, it is not the lack of religious freedom, but our failure to exercise it sufficiently. Why, then, are Donald Trump and the Republicans trying to sell us what we already have?

Imagine that the entire state of Connecticut, with a population larger than those of 20 states, was barred from participation in the presidential election, and we see how the Electoral College distorts the will of the people. Ultimately it must be eliminated with a Constitutional amendment that provides for a direct election of the president by the American people as a whole.

Lent is a kind of sabbatical: a break from the usual routines of our lives, over the forty-day period from Ash Wednesday until Easter. On the Sabbath, in the Jewish tradition, the prohibition from work is more precisely a break from doing things that interfere with Nature’s processes. According to the Torah, on the Sabbath you can pick up an apple that naturally falls from a tree onto the ground, but you can’t pick it from the tree. Mindful Christian meditative prayer practice is very similar. In it, we take time to see things as they are, without interfering with them or trying to fix or change them. Once we know what is, we can then think and act wisely on what ought to be.

Like a cosmic singularity, the jam was so tight and strong, so energetic and energizing, that it ended with a Big Bang. The movement really began when the marchlesss marches ended, after the long waits at crowded subway stations. We got home, turned on our screens and gazed awestruck at the images of ourselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder, filling squares and boulevards and bridges, spilling into side-streets. Now we move from protest into organized, long-term activism to stop the inhumane, immoral, and unpopular agenda of Trump and the Republicans.

A real “market-based” healthcare system is one in which people with the greatest need for medical attention will be the least likely to get it. It means people will be left on the streets to suffer and die from treatable conditions. It means that if you cannot afford insurance, and cannot pay cash for medical care, you cannot get into an emergency room if you have a life-threatening condition. It means that if you have no money to see a doctor, you have to beg. But if you have to beg, the people you know are probably not the ones who can come up with the cash to help you.

It’s an epiphany – the biblical Greek word for a sudden appearance or manifestation – to discover the difference between looking for and just looking. When I’m just looking, I see things I miss when I’m looking for.. like incarnations of God.

“Las Posadas” is an old Mexican tradition enacting the effort by Mary and Joseph to find a place to stay on Christmas Eve. Actors depicting Mary and Joseph wander from “inn” to “inn” asking for a room, with a singing candlelight procession following them through the town. Here I offer my own words for the tune:

When Yeshua was born, a star exploded in the sky, angels sang, and three astrologers from the East came to honor him. And shepherds came, too. They sat before the manger where the little baby lay. The astrologers placed treasures of gold, frankincense, and myrrh before the child. One of the shepherds took a little clay bird-shaped ocarina out of his tunic and blew a simple, joyful tune, his fingers dancing over its little holes as he blew through the hole in the bird’s mouth. Then he set it next to the other treasures as a gift to the baby.

Christmas Poetry: Churches are welcome to use these poems with attribution.

When it comes to doctrine, we progressive Christians have nothing for which to apologize. We don’t believe the old dogma that gets in the way of kindness, inclusion, science, and common sense. No wonder, then, that few of us know much about “apologetics”, a major preoccupation of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who memorize answers to the dozens of common objections to their doctrines.

What Happened:

On November 8, 58% of voting-age citizens cast ballots in the presidential election. In 2008, when Obama was elected, 64% cast ballots. When all the ballots are counted, Clinton will have won the popular vote by at least a million. Trump won the electoral college by squeaking ahead in some of the swing states: he was only 68,236 ahead in Pennsylvania, for example.

My face-to-face encounter with the pavement was one of those “values clarification moments”. It reminded me why I vote for political candidates who are committed to social justice. striving to create a society that ensures real help in fall-down-flat situations: those disasters that are not “respecters of persons” (Acts 10:34, KJV).

esus taught that lust is as bad as adultery. Covetousness is as bad as theft. Anger is as bad as murder. His was an “argumentum ad absurdum” against anybody claiming to be morally pure, which was a real social problem in Israel in his time. The wealthy, leisured Pharisees used countless fussy purity codes to bludgeon into submission the mass of common people who could not afford the time and money to comply.

tation, salute it and say: “I salute all those Americans who risked their lives for my right to vote!”

Ask your friends and family members, or in a ritual in worship, asking parishioners: “With which hand will you be voting on November 8?” Take that hand and hold it with yours, and say: “May love (or the love that is God) guide your hand to vote for the common good!”

Another way that religion can do a body good is through the mindfulness practices that are embedded in it. It’s no news that it’s part of Buddhism. But for most Christians, it may come as a surprise to find that it has always been integral to contemplative prayer. You can’t confess the truth of your heart unless you know what’s in it.

The 15th century North Indian poet-singer-saint, Kabir, lived in a time of great tension between two major religions. He honored and bridged both with his bhakti devotional songs. He was claimed by the Hindus to be a Hindu and by the Muslims to be a Muslim. He both inspired and confused both camps with his mystical lyricism. He confounded them even in the legend of his death. The Hindus wanted to burn his body, and the Muslims wanted to bury him. When they looked under the garlands of flowers that had been placed on top of his body, they saw that his body was gone. The Hindus burned half the flowers, the Muslims buried the other half.

One of the five pillars of Islamic practice is the expectation that every Muslim will make hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime. For some Muslims, making hajj is an arduous and very expensive journey.

But if your mind is your Mecca, why would you not make the journey to self-awareness every day?

Every time I enter into mindful prayer, I start by gazing into a mirror, dimly. A dim inner mirror, gazed at with dim inner eyes. Slowly I polish the mirror with loving, open, non-judgmental attention. My inner eyes begin to adjust and focus. And I begin to see not just the face I expect or want to see, but the whole picture of my thoughts, sensations, and urges – physically, mentally, and spiritually. Warts and stray hairs and happy smile and all! Behind the eyes that appear in the mirror I begin to awaken to the subtle eyes of the One who is doing the seeing. And then we begin to see, face to face…

  Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English anchoress, or religious hermit, wrote: “He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a …

Ever tried so hard to solve a problem that you thought your head would explode? You’re not alone. Sometimes our obsession to figure something out gets in our way of finding the answer.

Earth’s hot blood rises, bursts, and pours,
Scabs rough black across the plains,
Sinks, boils again, and rises slow;
Cools, congeals, as crystals grow;

Against or Through? With or For? But or And?

Skits for worship

If I were to condense a definition of mindfulness into a single word, agape would be the one.

Every time I teach a five-week mindfulness course for students and staff at USC, I introduce the class with a simple definition of the state we are trying to reach in the practice: a loving awareness of thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges in the present moment, while letting go of judgments about them.

“All flows ’round the One who knows all flows ’round the One who knows all flows….” I began to know the One who knew what I was knowing. I sensed the flow that went ’round the quiet Center of all experience. That Center was my center, and was at the center of every person who passed me on the trail, every bird that raced in a burst of color through the air, every tree I passed as I walked. At the center of every atom of every molecule of every tree. As I walked in contemplative union with God, I chanted: “All flows ’round the One who knows….”

“Love the sinner, but hate the sin.”

This phrase has been used countless times by some Christians to pretend to offer welcome to LGBT people while condemning the natural consequence of the way God made them. It speaks for a shallow kind of love at most: one that claims to be okay with a person’s same-sex orientation while stigmatizing its fulfillment. This noxious phrase also summarizes the underlying attitude of many people of other religions towards sexual minorities.

It is a phrase whose time has come – and gone. More than ever, it needs to be excised from the vocabulary of faith, once and for all, as it pertains to homosexuality.

This ceremony makes voting a matter of the heart. Anyone can do it! Ask a friend to hold out the hand with which he or she commits to vote in the next election. Hold that hand, or anoint it with light oil, and say: “May God, who is Love (or just Love) guide your hand to vote for the common good!” This video shows the ceremony being conducted at Mt Hollywood Congregational United Church of Christ in Sunday 10:30 worship in Los Angeles on 5-22-16.

Many saints of the Church’s history appear to have had contempt for their own bodies. The mortifications to which they subjected their flesh are incomprehensibly grotesque to Christians today. It is hard to reconstruct the cultural milieu in which these mortifications had meaning and purpose. There is a lingering disdain of the body still evident in most branches of the faith, and it is problematic. For too long we have viewed our faith as just a head-trip. We Christians need to take better care of the rest of ourselves, and to embody our spirituality more fully.

In the US, now is a better time to be an atheist than ever. A serious candidate for the presidency has declared on national television that he does not believe in God. The percentage of declared atheists and religiously unaffiliated people in America has risen substantially in recent years. To lack or reject religion is becoming considerably more socially acceptable.

That’s why the non-religious, and avowed atheists in particular, need theistic allies to defend them, more than ever.

When it comes to doctrine, we progressive Christians have nothing for which to apologize.  We don’t believe the old dogma that gets in the way of kindness, inclusion, science, and common sense. No wonder, then, that few of us know much about “apologetics”, a major preoccupation of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who memorize answers to the dozens of common objections to their doctrines.

hing remarkable happened in Culver City on Tuesday.

On April 12, 2016, Culver City, CA, with a population of roughly 40,000, held its city council election. It is estimated that when all vote by mail ballots are counted, the turnout will hit 24% of registered voters.

This may seem low, except that the turnout was 14.2% in the last election. The 24% voter turnout completely overshadowed that of neighboring Los Angeles county cities that held elections that day. The much larger city of Long Beach got only an 11.5% turnout on April 12.

What was different about Culver City?