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I’ve been facing alot of challenges this month – I don’t know about you.

The turmoil of election season – and its results – challenged me. Deeply.

The surge in racially-motivated violence in the United States had me fear for the safety of many whom I love – including my own family.

The book I collaborated on received a scathing review from an influential website of professed siblings in Spirit.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s been a good month, too. Beautiful connections with family, friends, and loved ones. A great time at AAR/SBL in San Antonio – a gathering of over 10,000 religion and spirituality scholars who really care about the difference faith and scholarship makes in the world.

Sometimes reality changes. Events cascade into our plans and desires, forcing us to rethink, recalibrate, reconsider. What seemed okay and important yesterday now appears irrelevant or not so urgent.

The road not taken. The poet Robert Frost’s famous line has been used so often, many think of it as a cliché. But it yet carries poetic power, because many, if not most, if not all of us have roads not taken in our lives, roads whose destinations are hidden from us, just as the lion Aslan explains to the children in The Narnia Chronicles that we are not told what might have been

In John 13:34-35, Jesus states that our very public witness of our Christian identity itself depends on whether or not we love one another. Otherwise, people will not recognize that we are indeed Christians. Jesus tells us to follow his example. Jesus not only gives the commandment to love, but also states that His life has modeled this love.

hese are all real people, feral children who, for various reasons, were separated from human beings early in life, and were adopted by families of the animals after whom they are named. None could speak human language. The bird boy chirped and flapped his arm-wings to communicate. The dog girl growled and walked on hands and knees. The gazelle boy could run 50 mph. After they were discovered, they found it impossible to assimilate into the company of homo sapiens, tried to and did escape, the unlucky ones restrained in insane asylums. Genetically, they might be the species homo, but they are not socialized humans. Yes, we need other people. At the most basic level, we need them to learn how to walk, eat, communicate, and just generally be in the company of others. I’m sure that any parent who has raised infants into children can identify with that process.

… keep awake–Christ may come suddenly and find you asleep. So be prepared. Keep awake! Watch for we know not when Christ comes. Watch, so that you might be found whenever and wherever Christ comes. Prepare the way for Christ.

The 2016 presidential election triggered an unexpected and nearly unbearable trauma for over half of the American people. For many, it felt like the death of a loved one, or the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, or the nightmare of 9/11. It felt like a wrecking ball shattering our nation’s fragile architecture of decent human values, urgent climate plans, and steadily expanding civil rights. Like many, I shared my distress wherever I went – in my men’s group, spirituality group, conscious aging circle, and conversations with loved ones, and knew that this threat to our way of life was magnitudes worse for vulnerable peoples – immigrants, religious and racial minorities, and the poor. We discussed protests, marches, political action and civil disobedience. I imagine that many of you had similar conversations in your communities as disbelief, shock, grief, tears, fear, insomnia, and horror fragmented psyches all across our land.

  Create a National “Golden Rule Day”. To create a national Golden Rule Day every May 15th, to serve as a shining example, a beacon of hope and a glorious celebration of how each day, in our …

There is a lot of debate about raising the minimum wage. The fight for $15 movement is going strong and has gained footing in a number of regions in the USA.

People are debating the merits from both sides.

However, there is one line of reasoning that I have not heard anyone else make, and it is significant. It is probably missed because it is so obvious that it’s right in front of our eyes.

Even better, you do not need a degree in economics to understand it.

Progressive churches have important work to do in the four years ahead.

They don’t need to become aligned with the Democratic Party. But they do need to become political. By that I mean tending to the politics of the day, namely, change, frustration, anger, some truly awful people planning to do bad things to their enemies, and a lot of good people on all sides wondering what direction American democracy is going.

What if we spent a good part of one day filling our chest cavity with a vision of love at every deep breath? What if the 25th was spent sending light and love outward to unsuspecting people. People we lived with daily. They might not guess we were doing it. Or people we thought about that day. What if we consciously directed what we know of God toward them? What if we did nothing more than nurture our sacred flame in the remembrance of a single soul lit in Bethlehem so long ago? Would Christmas be big enough to hold such a thing, or would it spill out into 12 days, or ordinary days, or 365 days?

Thanksgiving has always been a puzzle to me. As a German exchange student in 1993 in Virginia I remember it mostly for the empty campus. While people went home to overeat, the rest of us looked at closed restaurants and college food services. Later, when I was a grad student in New Jersey, the international students on campus staged our own improvised Thanksgiving, with our own cultural foods, mostly to stave off the sense of being left out of the celebration. As a foreigner, one is often left out of the traditions that most signify a culture. The only positive I have found in my years in the US is being introduced to pumpkin pie—and even that was an acquired taste.

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.

The following four documents were prepared by members of the Solidariteam. The Oceti Sakowin Camp Protocols were written with camp elders.

***“Get woke” and “Stay woke” refers to being aware of what’s going on around you in regards to racism and social injustice issues. “Woke” is the past tense of “wake,” and it refers to waking up to what’s going on around us.

Toni Reynolds, a Union Theological Seminary student and Young Leader in Religion, shares her thoughts on what social justice issue she is being called to work on right now.

ny church can grow. It won’t happen just by opening the doors on Sunday and welcoming whoever shows up. Growth isn’t that easy or passive. But growth can happen if leaders are willing to work at it, to use best practices and best tools, and to change whatever gets in their way.

That’s a tall order, of course, because most established institutions struggle with change and resist doing more than the known and the minimum.

DemocracyNow video broadcast from Morocco =, the site of the United Nations Climate Summit. The video reports on the Global Day of Action where protests happened in over 300 U.S. cities against the Dakota Access Pipeline.