Sacred listening
“Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.” – David Augsburger, Mennonite teacher and author Throughout the next year Central District Conference is conducting Sacred Listening conversations across the conference. The goal, as I understand it, is for conference leadership to get…
Sacred ground x2
This past weekend I was in Minnesota at the invitation of St. Paul Mennonite Fellowship. They have an annual retreat at a secluded retreat center an hour north of the twin cities. The time includes input from a guest and planning for the coming year. I presented about transitions. The…
Ritual and reality
“Ritual is a very ancient social technology and it fulfills the exact same roles today as it did for our ancestors thousands of years ago.” These were Dimitris Xygalatas’s closing words in an interview that aired on NPR’s All Things Considered last evening (8 minutes audio). Host Ari Shapiro had…
Midweek Blog: All the Feels
When I was getting ready for my sabbatical I had a list of books directly related to my topic (creativity and spirituality) that I was looking forward to diving into during those months away, but in the end it was a book that wasn’t on my original list that has…
First Nations Version, FNV
After seeing various verses cited in articles I’ve read, I recently purchased the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. It was released in 2021, the work of a twelve-member translation council from diverse tribal heritages and geographical areas, led by Terry M. Wildman (Ojibwe, Yaqui), a…
