In our worship life for the past several years we have participated in a program called “Soul Matters.” Developed at First Unitarian Church in Rochester, NY, Soul Matters provides monthly themes as a way to help focus worship so as to correct the all-too frequent model of jumping around week-to-week...
This is the text of a Letter to the Editor I wrote for my local paper, The Daily Progress, in response to an editorial they published prior to the events of August 12th, 2017. When studying the causes of WWI in junior high, my teacher said that the assassination of...
“Let us enter into that inner place of peace, that mood of meditation, that some call ‘prayer.’” I say this most Sundays as part of my introduction to the time of our service called Going Deeper. This is when we take time for silence, light Candles of Hope and Remembrance...
As I write, the visit of the Klu Klux Klan is about a week behind me, and I am about to leave Charlottesville for two weeks of vacation. (My family and I are driving up to Maine to visit for the first time since we all left more than a...
Whether we’re thinking about our current national political and cultural realities, the mood of our Association, recent events in our city, or even the state of things within our own congregation, many of us are decrying what seems to be a deepening sense of division, of separation. The classic question,...
I carry a collection of photographs on this iPad. Some are of my kids. (141, actually … pictures, not kids!) Just edging them out – at 156 pictures – is a collection I call “icons.” These are images of people – real and imaginary – who in one way or...
Summer of 2017: This is the official statement of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, outlining the response(s) planned by many of the faith communities in C’ville. (The list of signatories is at the end.) Over the next several days I will post more information, both practical and theological. The Charlottesville Clergy Collective is...
In perhaps one of her most well-known poems, Emily Dickenson wrote of hope: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all … My mother had a friend named Pauli Murray. I’ve mentioned her before, and...
Yesterday morning I joined with a group of people in a park in downtown Charlottesville. The park has been getting a lot of attention lately, both locally and in the national media, because of an effort to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee which stands so prominently in its...
Yesterday I promised that I would return to one of the most frequent responses people who identify as white have to the use of the term “White Supremacy” as the way to describe the dominant culture in which we, to borrow a phrase, “live, and move, and have our being.’...