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This blog post has the gem:

To say that humans are essentially “religious” is to claim that they are primed to worship, wired devote themselves to something as ultimate, to ascribe “worthship” to some ultimate end. So while people might be “taking leave” of belief in God or gods, or “apostasizing” from specific communities of religious practice, I don’t think that is sufficient to conclude that “religion is not universal or necessary.” On my account, secular devotion is not just “analogously” religious: it is religious. It is an expression and product of “secular liturgies.”

The Episcopal Church and the Protestant mainline in America today may be going through a normal “paschal pattern” — a dying and a rising — that all churches go through, said Bishop Frank T. Griswold. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

“There’s an arrogance and a self-confidence that is shattered by things falling apart,” said Griswold, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. But beneath the church’s many challenges is an invitation to deeper wisdom, a hidden grace that leads to new insight, wisdom and resurrection.

I believe that all of our actions can and should be filtered through these questions: is this action life-giving or is it death-dealing? Is it both or neither? In what ways? How do I know this? Because, after all, we often think something is life-giving when, in fact, it is death-dealing. We all have blind-spots and we all inherit ideologies and cultural or religious paradigms that make it difficult for us to evaluate our own actions. This, I think, is especially true when it comes to the ways in which we understand charity today, and so I wish to highlight some of the ways in which charity falls into the realm of that which is death-dealing, in contrast to the life-giving actions of the community that assembled around Jesus. This will be done with a series of seven contrasts.

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

Even the most bumbling passages of scripture have something to teach us about the human condition.  One of the lessons here is that some things never change.  Paul’s letter demonstrates for us that no task is ever so great that it cannot be derailed by some completely inconsequential concern.  “So you’re trying to change the course of human history with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, huh?  Well, before you do that, remind us all who you’ve baptized and why it doesn’t matter.”  So if you were shocked that the Leader of the Free World could be pestered into producing a long-form birth certificate by a reality TV star with bad hair and a penchant for conspiracy theories, you shouldn’t have been—some things never change.

More importantly, this scripture points to a truth about human nature and church life.  Church people absolutely love to talk about unity and the church as The Body of Christ.  And yet, there are over 40,000 denominations of Christianity last I heard. (Yes, 40,000. That wasn’t a typo nor did I misspeak.)  The urge for unity, however strong, pales in comparison to the allure of sectarianism.  Wendell Berry perceived our situation well when he wrote that, for some people, “the highest Christian bliss would be to get to heaven and find that you were the only one there—that you were right and all the others wrong.”  The sectarian impulse is comfortably situated next to self-righteousness in our religious imagination, and self-righteousness is alive and well much more than we care to acknowledge.

This guy. Jared Hillary Ruark is one of my role models (there, I said it). I’m proud to call him friend.

Rev. Dr. Janet Edwards provides answers to the typical questions religious opponents pose regarding LGBT acceptance. What would your answers be?

Question 1: “How can you ignore the clear meaning of Scripture and all of Christian tradition that says same-sex love is a sin?”

Question 2: “How can you be sure that you aren’t just making stuff up to justify something that is culturally trendy?”

Question 3: “Don’t all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people violate the Biblical requirement of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman?”

Question 4: “How can any Christian, in good conscience, engage in or condone sexual practices that are both unnatural and dangerous?”

Question 5: “How can you dismiss the way Jesus can heal people who suffer from an affliction like alcoholism or same sex attraction?”

All good answers, especially to get the conversation going. Granted, this conversation has been going for over 30 years in most mainline churches. One of my priests even went so far as to say that he thought it was a non-issue. LGBT+ people were welcome. Period. I found that encouraging, but a little too dismissive of the very real battles still going on for the “heart of Christianity”.