That great defender of the faith, Don Trump, responding in faux outrage to the fact that Trans Visibility Day happened to coincide with Easter this year, declared that Election Day 2024 should be “Christian Visibility Day.” As if Christians have a visibility problem in America today. Drive through Simi Valley, the town where the church I serve is located, and you’ll find a great deal of Christian visibility. Churches are everywhere—even here in California, the Bible Shoestring of America. But in Simi Valley, one of the very few places you’ll experience trans visibility or LGBTQ+ visibility in ..read more

The year 2024 marks the 800th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas and the 750th anniversary of his death.  To celebrate these events this year, the creation spirituality movement in America and Italy are sponsoring a one-week workshop in Orvieto, Italy. Orvieto is an artist town today as it was 750 years ago—Aquinas wrote poetry and theology and taught there for a while.  It is amazing to reflect on the quantity and quality of his work that was accomplished in a lifetime that spanned only 49 years on this earth. It has been my privilege to absorb the teachings of Aquinas in my ..read more

What does that mean, “the son of God”?… It means giving birth to me in the sense that is my ground – it’s what constitutes me. It means that the divine, the God presence, is here, and out of this God presence, something individual emerges, something personal. These words were written by A.H. Almaas in his new book, Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality. I would say wholeheartedly yes to Almaas’s understanding of “the son of God.” But his awareness, while beautifully expressed, is neither original nor unique, and that is important to know. Scholars have debated for decades w ..read more

Who is Donald Trump?  As our nation prepares for another contentious presidential election seven months from now, the cult and menace of Donald Trump continue to loom large on the horizon.  It would be hard to imagine a more dishonest, corrupt, and unfit candidate for President of the United States.  And still, this is the man conservative-evangelical Christians stand behind as the next occupant of the White House.  MSNBC just had an interview with the former Prime Minister of Australia who has observed Trump on the world stage.  He said, in the presence of Vladimir Pu ..read more

  And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.                                                                   from “The Riddlers” by Walter de la Mare   I missed my deadline. In the pa ..read more

There are many events included in what Christians call Holy Week. The Entry into Jerusalem, Jesus overthrowing the tables of the Temple money-changers, his soulful prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane asking the Father to spare him crucifixion if it be His will, having a Last Supper with his disciples, betrayal, and arrest, appearing before the Jewish High Council, appearing before Pilate, all of this culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. As one might expect, there is a great variety of opinion about the historicity and meaning of these “events”, due, no doubt, to the nature of our so ..read more

A dominant message, at least in Western media, is that we deserve better and we will get there.  For the profanely privileged or perpetually oppressed, modernity and capitalism peddle fixes for all, if we just vote right.  Comical?  Delusional?  Enraging?  Out of touch?  Exhausting? Yes.  And you probably have more words to add. To think that we can isolate and fix our struggles with no regard for our interrelatedness perpetuates harm and pain. The late Thomas Berry, Passionist priest and self-professed “geologian,” famously reminded us that we are not a “col ..read more

In a recent Progressing Spirit Article, Matthew Fox said: It is no secret that institutional religion in the West finds itself in decline… It seems that a post-religious consciousness is part of the fabric of the foreseeable future. Maybe all this is a blessing in disguise for religion–a shake-up and stripping down for a new era of faith and belief and action. Then he posed this question: “What treasures should we take from the burning building” of our fading religious institutions? His two-part answer: the mystics, who say Yes to life, and the prophets, who, having tasted the Yes, say No to ..read more

  To most of us, the latest survey results from Pew Research are no surprise. The “Nones” (Americans claiming no religious affiliation) have risen to become the largest “religious” cohort in the country. At 28% (Catholics are 23% and evangelical Protestants are at 24%), many of these unaffiliated Americans point to the church’s anti-science stance as one of the main reasons for their disaffection. Nevertheless, Fundamentalist Christians are doubling down in their continued efforts to discredit science and advance their antediluvian worldview through state legislation and school board elec ..read more

  If progressive Christians pride themselves on radical truth-telling, then our time has come, and it will be dangerous. We claim to prize critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, but what happens when this leads us to conclusions that are effectively censored by the very people we have historically championed and defended? With free speech under withering attack, what will happen to those of us who have long-held unpopular and unorthodox religious beliefs? Just consider our present dilemma. We have long preached that the Palestinian Jew named Jesus was on the side of the oppressed ..read more