Quest Blog
Saving the music, Saving our souls
2014-01-14 Much talk is made of gentrification, but I want to take a moment and lift up the shadow side of all the cool new coffee houses and increased property taxes – dispossession. New Orleanians who managed to return post-flood are finding themselves pushed out of the city by the incredible post-2005 rent & tax…
Read MoreA Gift, A Letter, and a Drowning Man: The Legacy of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
2014-01-16 There’s an old Zen story that does like this: Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat. This of course was a challenge to…
Read MoreFrosted Windows and Heavy Hammers
2014-01-17 A few weeks ago, I decided that this is the year that I am going to smash a few windows. I wrote all about it in this post here. I wrote about my struggles with comparisons and image and perfectionism, about all the ways that I let fear and doubt and what others might think hold me back, about the ways that I am trying to carve…
Read MoreHow Is It with Your Day?
2014-01-21 I recently asked a friend, via e-mail, what her daily routine was like. It was delightful to get a sense of her day in an hour-by-hour play-by-play sort of way. I could tell from her rough daily itinerary where she lived (and that she and her family are enjoying the warm southern-California winter weather)…
Read MoreEpiphany (Continues)
2014-01-21 [More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…] Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read…
Read MoreFlying Over the Squares (for small farmers)
2014-01-23 The little towns in their squares light up, as do the scattered lights of farmyards in the tilting, fuzzy squares they’re locked in. I balance a Chilian red on a bumpy flight out to one of those squares. The West is red too, after we bump to a cruising altitude through clouds…
Read MoreWorthy to be Entrusted
2014-01-27 (Today, I preached at the ordination of a new minister in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism. Her name is Rev. Lara Campbell, and I shared the pulpit with Rev. Michael Tino. Here is my half of the sermon.) “Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great…
Read MoreTake Good Care
2014-01-27 I was taught in seminary to do ministry with sacred texts in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Our theological and ethical musings are of no consequence if they cannot be applied to what is happening outside the walls of our congregations, if they do not speak to people’s lives. As the…
Read MoreA Whole Heart: Remembering Pete Seeger
2014-01-29 For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If…
Read MoreA Scream and a Theory: Natural Selection and the Higher Moral Order
2014-01-30 Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything…
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