For this week of honoring the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Kings Jr, I share words from Rosemarie Freeney Harding from her memoir Remnants.  Rosemarie and her husband Vincent were close companions of the Kings and involved, for a time, in the racially integrated “Mennonite House” in Atlanta. “Martin and Coretta and Anne Braden and Ella Baker and others like them had a beautiful effect on people who spent time with them.  Living and working in their presence hastened changes in your own thoughts, your reactions, your priorities; even if you weren’t cognizant of the shift.  It’s like Bernice Reagon talks about in her Veterans of Hope Project interview.  She recalls how she and other children in her small southwest Georgia church congregation would ‘sit up in the singing,’ not joining in at first, but surrounded by the energy and power of those songs, the molding fellowship of that

Last Saturday I was doing some house cleaning while listening to a podcast, the most recent episode of NPR’s “Planet Money.”  I was intrigued with the title: “The economics lessons in kids’ books.”  I was even more intrigued when the episode centered on an elementary classroom “in the Columbus, Ohio suburbs,” which turned out to be Shale Meadows Elementary School in Olentangy Local School District.  No personal connections I know of (although probably some I don’t know of), but cool that a national podcast had a local focus.  It was a fun episode featuring a skilled teacher interacting with her engaged students around economic issues presented in books like Frog and Toad and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, spliced with commentary from Planet Money’s Erica Beras about economic theory.  An agreement between the district and NPR that the selected readings would be non-political seemed to be a nonissue until

I recently read an article about what it means to seek wisdom and was reflecting on how one of my favorite ways to think about this thing we call Christianity is as a “wisdom tradition.” As the article suggests, wisdom can be hard to pin down or define, but it always goes beyond just a collection of facts or ideas. As a “wisdom tradition” Christianity is less about the intellectual assent to a list of beliefs and more about the ever-evolving, communal practice of wrestling with how the stories, teachings, and poetry of our tradition can help us lead more meaningful lives. And as the article further suggests, wisdom is about recognizing our own limitations and learning from those who offer wisdom different than our own.  We will have the opportunity to partake in this kind of wisdom-sharing with our upcoming Coming of Age Celebration on February 5th. For those

Happy Solstice.  It’s the shortest day and longest night of the year.  It’s the first day of winter and it sounds like winter will soon be felt.  It’s a good time for mammals to give thanks for fur, and those who have lost their fur to find a warm blanket, or a fireplace, or an HVAC register.  It’s a good time to be inside not just a den or a home, but inside one’s thoughts.  To enter the rich darkness of interiority, to sit in the mystery of self and other.  There is a natural rhythm to all this. We don’t know what time of year Jesus was actually born, but it’s a good time to mark the occasion, a few days into the light’s return.  Mary births Jesus from the rich darkness of her body and holds him in the dark, skin on skin warmth.  When the light arrives,

One of the core theological ideas of Advent and Christmas is incarnation.  In sum, G-d took human form in the person of Jesus.  John’s Gospel has no nativity scene, but does contain this one-sentence incarnational Christmas story: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” John 1:14  Some streams of Christianity have emphasized the uniqueness of this event, and thus the exclusiveness of access to G-d through Jesus.  Other streams, including the mystics and many Eastern forms of Christianity, have emphasized incarnation as a continuous reality – ever-occurring events – from the first flaring forth of the universe through the time you’re reading this and beyond.  A fancy Latin name for this is incarnatio continua.  Another name is incarnational mysticism, with mystic signifying one who has an inner experience of union with the Divine.  Or, more modestly, a mystic can be one who has begun to sense the sharp