Perhaps it’s fitting that in the same week we officially start the 2020 presidential election campaign we also commemorate a priest and civic leader who helped shaped a vision of the proper relationship between church and state. Born in 1603, Roger Williams was an ordained priest in the Church of England who opposed the autocratic …
Category: Uncategorized
a world without hatred
Seventy-five years ago today the prisoners in the concentration camps at Auschwitz were liberated. Since that moment we've had to face, and live with, the horrifying reality of what humans can do to one another when in the grip of fear and hatred, poisoned thinking and nationalistic fervor. A few years ago when I toured …
hope beyond war, hope beyond history
News reports and analyses of the first wars I followed in any sense of real-time - the Iraqi war and the wars in the Balkans in the 1990's - often seemed to wander towards the same open-ended conclusion: there's so much history here, and it's complicated. The reports recognized with some measure of fatalism that …
the right people
How do we find the right people to rebuild a church? Or even build on something that's plugging along fine? Do they need to be of a certain generation? Have a certain income or skill set? Do you prefer lifelong members of your church or new blood? I've found that they need to be none …
the most anxious person in the room
Sometimes we let most anxious person in the room decide the agenda and the tone. When we do, the work that we need to be doing do often goes undone. This week's experience with Florence reminded me of the hurricane that accompanied my early days at my first church gig. A gulf-coast storm had disrupted …
BJ's Blog 