Recently I’ve been reading from a book by Cynthia Lindner titled Varieties of Gifts: Multiplicity and the Well-Lived Pastoral Life.  She teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  It’s a book about pastoral ministry, but much of it applies to anyone attempting adulthood. One of the ideas I’ve found helpful is this: “Lively, functioning adult selves are always emerging from whatever sense of identity we’ve achieved” (p. 96).  Rather than a solid and continuous form of identity as the crowning achievement of adulthood – I’m a business person, I’m a mother, I’m a home owner, I’m a Christian – Lindner suggests that we are always “moving back and forth between who we know ourselves to be and who we might yet become, between received tradition and new insight, between traditional practices and adaptive ones.” This is healthy adulthood, and comes with risks.  It can be easier to cling

I didn’t hear about spiritual direction until I went to seminary.  There I heard about this unique kind of relationship one can form with a spiritual director, and what is meant by “direct.”  Rather than being a therapeutic relationship or counseling, spiritual directors are trained at directing another’s attention toward areas in one’s life that might be fertile ground for growth.  Each director has a different style, but they all are skilled listeners.  The “spiritual” part of direction is the connectivity that one’s life has with oneself, others, and that mysterious reality we call God.  Healthy spirituality allows us to become more fully alive in our humanity. We’re all spiritual beings, whether we are conscious of it or not. I’ve had three spiritual directors – one during my last year of seminary, one in Cincinnati, and in the last year I’ve begun meeting once every 6-8 weeks with a director

“The one thing that would be dishonorable for us is to bring all this attention to the assassination of Dr. King and not have a resurrection of the efforts and the unfinished business dealing with systemic racism, systemic poverty.”  Rev. Dr. William Barber II Fifty years ago today Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.  The anniversary is as important as we choose to make it. The narrative I absorbed through most of my life was that the Civil Rights movement exposed deep seated racism in the US, inspired millions, won key legislative victories, and set our country on course toward racial equality.  And here we are, almost there, with merely a scattering of personal prejudices yet to be overcome.  That’s a powerful narrative, made all the more compelling because it centers on a hero, Dr. King. Over the last several years

  I was in Washington, DC Monday through Wednesday of this week, part of a faith leaders delegation through Mennonite Central Committee.  We were there to learn about and lobby for just immigration policies, specifically a clean Dream Act.  We were a group of mostly pastors, mostly non-white, from around the US.  This is most of us, in the basement of the MCC Washington office on Tuesday. Our time culminated in hill visits Wednesday morning, meeting in pairs with staffers of our Representative and Senators.  A write up about the delegation can be found HERE. I arranged my flights to arrive early Monday and leave late Wednesday in order to have time to enjoy a few of the Smithsonian museums.  A conversation with a CMCer before leaving helped me better connect the two very different experiences of museum hopping, and dipping into entrenched national politics.  He noted that the Washington,

This past week I had the opportunity to attend the Schooler Institute on Preaching at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio.  It was led by the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney who drew on her expertise in biblical interpretation and womanist hermeneutics to challenge and inspire attendees to take seriously our calling as ministers of the Word.  Gafney writes in her book, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne, “Most simply, womanism is black women’s feminism.”  This is, indeed, the simple answer to the question, “What is womanism?” and Gafney is quick to unpack more fully the way womanism is more than just feminism channeled through black women.  There is far more to unpack than will fit in a blog post (Coffee, anyone?), but I will say that one of the things I appreciated most from the workshop was the invitation to approach scripture with