Last week, on the heels of a summer with everyone in my family off on their own adventures, I met up with my husband, Lynn, in New York City. We enjoyed walking through the city streets and parks, riding the…
Contemplative prayer This weekend I shared the “Contemplative Prayer” video with some of my new chaplain friends who serve hospitals and prisons in Cuba. I was glad to share this video in particular because it has new Spanish closed captioning.…
This week we want to share a guest blog by my friend, Rev. Alisha Smith Haddock, minister at Christian Journey Fellowship Church and director of the McGruder Family Resource Center in North Nashville. Recently we featured my interviews with her…
The world is on fire. How are we going to respond? In the past week, my attention and all my news and social feeds were riveted to the protests in more than 140 cities in the US and globally, over…
There are many powerful rituals available for ministers to engage while leading people of faith. In this post, I want to share two stories about engaging ritual. This past weekend I took some of my seminary students to the “Beating…
I am composing this post between the Women’s Marches across the U.S. on Saturday and the MLK Day marches on Monday. So many inequalities still plague the social fabric of our lives. So much animosity still divides this country. Churches…
Change “We can shape but can’t control these possibilities to grow.” -Seryn The one constant of the universe? Change. Well, it depends on which cosmology you are embracing today . . . My own is under construction (as usual). My…
When a flood overruns the banks of a river, things are swept into surprising places. In early May of 2010 my neighborhood and all of Nashville saw the most dramatic flood in living memory. The news cameras caught a building floating down the interstate. One child was swept through a culvert only to survive. The rivers roses to inundate homes, schools, businesses, cars, roads and bridges. The death toll was over 30. The financial cost of the destruction was estimated in the billions. Efforts to sort through the damage and rebuild from the destruction continue and will for months and years to come.