Griffins Without Faces My 3-year-old grandson, Matthew, attends a pre-school in Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk in the lovely land of East Anglia. To get there, we walk along a few quiet residential streets till we get to a narrow driveway defined on either side by tall lush greenery. At the entrance to the driveway stand two brick pillars. Atop each pillar is a small stone griffin. The faces of the griffins have been hammered off. From the aging of the stone, I’d say the hammering took place a very long time ago.  It is possible the griffins were defaced (literally) by random vandals, but ..read more

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I share with you a blog I wrote last year because this Epistle is a variation on that theme. You may want to check it either before or after reading the 34thEpistle. The blog says our project as the Church is to be in relationship with each other, and then together to be in relationship with the world outside on behalf of Christ. It also says that is a hard project indeed and we often fail chiefly because relationship costs us a piece of ourselves, and that’s a price we are not willing to pay. http://bishopdansblog ..read more

Society is torn. There is so much acrimony and division these days over political ideologies, race, gender, religion, and most anything people can imagine to divide up over. I would have thought that was clear, but in a recent social media post by the Southern Poverty Law Center showing a photo of a toddler in a KKK outfit, comments came back defensively denying that we are in significant conflict. We are even in conflict over whether we are in conflict. One clear indicator of our divisions, hate crime, is indisputably and dramatically on the rise.[i] When the present day is all shouting an ..read more

I know that my redeemer lives And at the last day he shall stand upon the earth. And though this body be destroyed I shall see God I myself will see him, my own eyes, I, and not another.                                                      Job 19 Recently in a St. Louis airport café a widow asked me to explain my beliefs about the aft ..read more

Our hearts break yet again over another mass shooting. This time it happened here in Nevada at a country music festival. It feels more real to us. From children slaughtered in a Colorado high school and a Connecticut elementary school to young adults at a gay nightclub in Orlando to Black worshippers in a South Carolina church to county music fans in Nevada, violence strikes any and all of us randomly. The perpetrators sometimes clothe their crime in an ideology – sometimes religious, sometimes political, sometimes racial, and sometimes not at all. The common thread is the choice of violence ..read more

I hear that when you come together as church there  are divisions among you and to some extent I believe it.                                                             1 Corinthians 11: 18 What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Do they not come from the evil desires with ..read more

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Prologue: One sunny July morning in 2007, I woke up in one of my favorite cities, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Being a church-going guy, I set out for a nearby old Roman Catholic Church and took a seat near the back. During the first lesson, an elderly – or maybe she had just had a hard life – homeless bag lady came in and sat beside me. During the sermon she nodded off, slumped my way, and slept through the priest’s proclamation with her head on my shoulder. She woke up around the Creed. I spoke even less Spanish then than I ..read more

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Whither thou goest I will go. Thy people shall be my people, and thy god; my god.  Ruth No passage of Scripture is more central to the spiritual crisis of our time, the choice we each and all must make, the heart of our faith.  I.               The horizontal floor beneath the pillar of faith. This is the wonky reflection on the Bible as literature leading into philosophy. So, if you want to get to the point, feel free to skip to sectio ..read more

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. After wandering in our desert for nigh unto a decade, my understanding of the challenge we face has distilled in the heat of our sun. It has been a purgation as all sorts of ideas, feelings, and attitudes have been burned away. The question I ask now may not be of immediate or obvious interest to you. I tie my mind in knots over how to be the Church. You are struggling with your daily lives of family, work, relationships, finances, and all the stuff that makes up a life. What I am struggling with matters to you only if tw ..read more

The vanity license plate on a pickup truck here in Elko reads, “Bowup.” For those unfamiliar with the expression, it is “Bow up.” It means to assume a fighting posture. The neck and back curve defensively. The elbows bend. The fists clench. You get the picture. I gather the license plate is an invitation or an admonition to any and all to “bow up” to fight for anything that comes along. I learned the expression “bow up” from my father. He would tell the story of some conversation at work or at a baseball game. At some point in the story, one of the characters would “bow up.” Invariably, in ..read more