Making My Way in Ethics, Worship, and Wood
I am pleased to announce the appearance of Making My Way in Ethics, Worship, and Wood: An Expository Memoir. In this book I lay out the main way of thinking …
Demons Personal and Public
America needs its own day of Yom Kippur — a day of repentance and atonement, a day of confession and renewal. Without a time set aside for naming this essential …
Bad Memories — Guest Posting by Scott A. Taylor
Readers of these postings will remember that I have spent many months recently helping to lead efforts by members of our church and community to examine our racist history and …
Race, Remembrance, and Forgiveness
I am presently engaged in a lengthy course at our church (via Zoom, naturally) entitled “Struggling with Race, Remembrance, and Reparations.” Over forty of us are gathering every week to …
Living in God’s Image: Despotism or Republican Democracy?
My thoughts about the despotism that is infecting our virus-plagued lives have gained a new articulation in The Christian Citizen, an American Baptist journal stimulating reflection on the church’s involvement …
Masks, Rights, and Covenants
Some people around us claim they have a right to refuse to wear a mask during the Covid pandemic. For some it is an appeal to a vague penumbra of …
Religion and Our Constitutional Crisis
Last Sunday I made a Zoom presentation of a talk that had been scheduled BP (Before the Pandemic) with the Ethical Humanist Society of Asheville. In the talk, I returned …
Breathing Together
I was just slipping into my nighttime ritual of reading in bed before lights out when I heard a commotion out on the street and the cry, “I can’t breathe!” …
Memorial Day—A Day of Reconciliation?
It is Memorial Day in America—a time to grieve and honor those who have died in all America’s wars, including those who fought on both sides in our Civil War. …
Blessed Be the Bond
I am happy to announce the publication of the third edition of my book Blessed Be the Bond: Christian Perspectives on Marriage and Family. First published by Fortress Press in …
Sanctuary — For Guns?
In the midst of our enormous efforts to hold our Republic together around its founding principles and values, a movement, fostered by the gun industry and its lobbies, has arisen …
The Worship at the Heart of Liberation
Each year our church seeks out 40 people from the congregation to write a brief meditation to help people follow a discipline of reflection during Lent—the forty weekdays leading to …
Whose Apocalypse?
Australia is burning. It’s been burning even from the beginning of its springtime. The fires will not relent for some months to come. And then California and parts of other …
Kings, Despots, and the Children
It’s Advent again, overlaid with the sediments of Christmas, and so I return again to familiar themes—Jesus, Mary, Joseph the builder, Herod, and yes, the slaughtered children. But as evil …
God’s Federal Republic — In Print Again!
I am happy to announce that Wipf and Stock Publishers have brought out a handsome reprint of my 1987 book God’s Federal Republic: Reconstructing our Governing Symbol. It is doubly …
Dorian and Greta
From the Atlantic Ocean has recently come the devastating power of hurricane Dorian as well as the quiet voyage, by solar sailboat, of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from England to New …