Emerging from the Soil
I love these days in the last week of December. My gaze often goes to the sky as the sun slowly begins to move higher. Hiking today, I began to see other signs emerging from the soil. After the snow has melted, life is getting ready for the spring. If you look closely at the…
Read MoreSettle In
I grew up in a farming town. People there mostly grow winter wheat. There were seasons that marked our life there, whether you farmed or not. The fall was a time of planting, assessing, and accounting the profits and losses of the year. The winter was a mixture of vacation, doing major repairs to equipment,…
Read MoreHopeful Beginnings
This week we began our conversations in Skagit County to form a local multi-faith partnership. Local groups are putting together a planning team that will lead communities with different wisdom traditions to do partnership activities in 2023. This is part of our Let’s Go Together program. Over the last six months I have been talking…
Read MoreMore Than We Know
Human beings and human societies always have struggles and anxieties. If we were all in the same room we could easily name many of the great challenges of our day: A crisis of trust in each other Lack of equal status for people of diverse groups Wealth and income inequality Climate change And more of…
Read MoreShocking But Not Surprising
We are all filled with grief at the shooting that took place at the Q Club in Colorado Springs. What happened there is shocking. It is, grievously, not surprising. In high school we had three bullies in my class. They had a group of followers who actually did most of the damage. One week, they…
Read MoreFeels So Good
I feel so blessed by the 20 people who took a chance and joined us in our “alpha” test of the Let’s Go Together course. After almost three years of having to teach only through Zoom, it was so meaningful to me to actually be with people in the same room. More than that, I…
Read MoreRenewed Determination
A fellow pastor walked up to me after the Funeral for one of our founders, Father William Treacy. She came to the the funeral to honor him. She was the first female pastor in the area. Father Treacy was the only pastor or priest in the area to reach out and welcome her. This is…
Read More
Rising to Meet Antisemitism
Last spring I was honored to interview Devin Burghart from IREHR, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. We spoke about white nationalism and white Christian nationalism, how it threatens our democracy, and what we can do about it. This conversation has been much on my mind as we have seen Antisemitic statements,…
Read More
Brave Conversations in first LGT Class
In the first week we focused on the unity in diversity of the world. In the monotheistic traditions this is grounded in one Creator, a set of common parents of all humanity, and thus our unity as a human family. All too often the idea of one Creator is reduced to one religion about that Creator. This distorts the core teaching of monotheism, turning our recognition of each other as human into “us versus them.”
Read More