Public Life

Pray for the Republic

We pray for the republic           where each voice is heard speaking freely from the heart,           where each ear is bent upon the task of understanding,           where the stranger finds a …

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Bishops, Kings, and Tyrants

On January 21, 2025, Bishop Mariann Budde of the Episcopal diocese of Washington DC turned to the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump at the end of her homily during the …

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Meeting Roger Williams (again)

I have long known that one of my distant ancestors is Roger Williams, the seventeenth century founder of Rhode Island. (For you genealogists: Roger, Daniel, Peleg, Daniel, Thomas, Mary (Hoag), …

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What is Pravda?

When the Communist Party of Russia came to power in 1918, they set up a newspaper that would be their official organ of propaganda until the collapse of the Soviet …

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Christmas in Ukraine

There are times in our individual lives, in the lives of communities and nations, and now even on this planet, when a catalytic flash seems to weld together our fitful …

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Fetal Personhood?

The US Supreme Court’s reversal of its earlier ruling (Roe v. Wade) upholding women’s right to abortion, has intensified the argument that the fetus, from the moment of conception, is …

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Aiming at our Heart

Even as our throats are choked with grief and our tongues are silenced before the evil of the violence in Ukraine and across America, we know that we must return …

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The Holy Work of Reparations

I recently finished leading a group of about 20 people here at our church through the book Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, by Duke Kwon and Gregory …

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Bodies Together at Table

We are all weary, bone weary, from the sense of loss, of powerlessness, of the shadow of doom that hangs over the earth. It is another “end of the age” …

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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 …

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History: The Tragedy and the Farce

Karl Marx begins his famous essay of 1851, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” with the statement that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as …

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