Quest Blog
A Heretic Mulls Over Epiphany
2013-01-06 Today is The Epiphany, when Christians celebrate as the day when Jesus was revealed to the Gentiles as the Son of God. But what of us who don’t hold this belief–who believe instead that Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a healer, but not uniquely marked as the Son of God? What does Epiphany…
Read MoreLike-Hearted People
2013-01-18 “You need not think alike to love alike.” This was the wisdom of Francis David, spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the Unitarian king who pronounced the first edict of religious toleration in the year 1568. You need not think alike to love alike. At Unitarian Universalist gatherings, I sometimes hear “it is so nice…
Read MoreEndurance
2012-10-06 “The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.” Dean Acheson (attrib.) We are accustomed to regard a person’s circumstances when we consider his or her level of suffering. Certainly certain conditions are more conducive to despair than others. Inmates in a…
Read MoreThoughts on Death and Lasagna
2012-10-08 Last night, as I lay dozing on the couch, I awakened with a start at 10:30 and jumped up. It was time, I suddenly knew, to make a pan of lasagna for a family where a death was imminent. Right now. Not in the morning, as I had planned. Now. As I went into…
Read MoreIn 1492…
2012-10-08 In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue… So began the ditty that most of us (children in U.S. schools) learned about Christopher Columbus, who (we were taught) “discovered” America. I remember making little replicas of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria out of walnut shells, play dough, and toothpicks. This…
Read MoreLove Is the Spirit of This Church
2012-10-20 “Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law.” So begins a well-beloved passage adapted from the words of the Rev. James Vila Blake, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Evanston, Illinois. These words are often spoken in the life of our faith. Several of the congregations I’ve served spoke them communally…
Read MoreFireworks
2012-10-21 Truth be told, I don’t feel like writing a blog this morning. I just feel like watching Katy Perry and an 11 year old autistic girl named Jodi DiPiazza perform Perry’s song, “Fireworks,” over and over. Having watched it about eight times now—and forced everyone who has been near my Iphone or computer to…
Read MoreWe Do Not Fear People Whose Stories We Know…
2012-10-22 Back before the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon was attacked by plane, before there was a US Department of Homeland Security, way back when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was known as the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service,) – a lifetime ago and yet still less than fifteen years have passed – I served as a Legal…
Read MoreWhat God Intends
2012-10-25 Let’s be fair, here. I’m sure that Richard Mourdock did not in any way mean to defend rape when he said that he thinks that God intends for babies to be born who are conceived through rape. I would hope that no one could believe in a God who intends for women to be…
Read MoreA Prayer in Stormy Weather
2012-10-28 Like many people in North America, today I am watching the weather maps anxiously, wondering if the people I love in various places will be safe and sound. Though I am personally far from any swirling images, I wonder whether people I know, and those I have never met, will have a warm place…
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