We inherit prejudices from our family of origin as well as the culture around us and in the media. The first time our irrational prejudices are confronted, it is unlikely that we will give them up. For most of us, overcoming gender, racial, sexual orientation, or religious prejudices was a process of many steps taken over several years. Once free of that curse, we will do well to remember that our transformation took time, reflection, critical thinking, and no small amount of patience out of oth...
Jun 29, 2025•18 min
Our mind can be our worst enemy, the invisible opponent who keeps us from staying in the battle with our visible opponents. We need to learn to pay attention to how our internal voice is talking to us. Does it tell us that we are a loser, does it call us stupid, or insist that we give up? If so, we really need to take control of our self talk, to focus of positive thoughts, encouragement, and hope. Persons of conscience in this time of great social struggle have to remain "cheerful" as we contin...
Jun 15, 2025•19 min
For centuries the world's religions have constructed a mental prison in which they try to control the conduct of their adherents through threats of eternal torture or, for the very good, promises of eternal reward. However, once you awaken to the reality that these are empty promises and threats, in a world where there is not heaven or hell, then there are no moral absolutes . . . then we are left to discern for ourselves, "how shall we then live?"
Jun 01, 2025•18 min
Between Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day, let us consider what it is that holds couples together in this age of liberty when neither church nor society has much to say when a couple decides to call it quits. Are we trying hard enough to foster healthy relationships what create a healthy environment both for child rearing and retirement? Does our faith have something to say about commitment and self sacrifice?
May 18, 2025•23 min
We have now seen Donald Trump through the first 100 days of his second term and what we have witnessed has been a horrifying attack on our constitutional democracy. It is sad to have to admit that the clowns are now running the circus but what is more frightening is that our nation may not survive the Trump administration with either our constitution or our democracy intact. We cannot just avoid talking about politics and hope that everything will be ok. We are in danger and there are no hoofbea...
May 04, 2025•31 min
By the end of the first century of the common era, the message of Jesus the preacher had been entirely transformed into a message about Jesus, turning the spokesperson of radical compassion into a magical symbol who hods out a promise of life after death. We have no reliable sources to tell us much about the message of the historical Jesus since the authors of the New Testament had their own agendas which had little or nothing to do with what the historical Jesus had to say. We have only hints a...
Apr 20, 2025•16 min
Estrangement among family and friends is a sad occurrence which is becoming increasingly common in a society that continues to trend towards isolation and loneliness. Our decade is more polarized than most but even though we can rehearse the arguments to defend our distance from parents, siblings, and formerly close friends, we really can do better if we make reconciliation our goal. Sometimes we have to put some distance between ourselves and those who would extinguish our "light" but estrangem...
Apr 06, 2025•19 min
The greatest moral failing of the modern world may be our quiet acceptance of what Dorothy Day called "our filthy rotten system." Every year the income gap grows wider and the gap in ownership of capital becomes more stark. If we cannot change course it is not hyperbole to predict that the USA is on its way to becoming what we have too easily called a "third world country."
Mar 23, 2025•25 min
If we ask ourselves what it was about the historical Jesus that inspired the loyal following and explosion of writing on his behalf in the first century of the common era, beyond all of the talk about a kind of divine fire insurance, we find a message that is unique and powerful and nearly impossible to incorporate into our lives: Love your enemies. As Marcus Borg described him, Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion and that, in the most healthy spiritual context, is why we still talk abou...
Mar 09, 2025•22 min
The Bible doesn't speak with one point of view nor does it teach a singular message. Religious people have to be willing to enter the debate which is found even within the pages of scripture in order to choose the right path towards a healthy spirituality. You can find harsh judgement and prejudice in the Bible, and, if you look, you can find the cure for harsh judgement and prejudice. It just depends on what you are looking for.
Feb 23, 2025•26 min
Realizing that he had made a tragic mistake by ending his engagement to Regine Olsen, the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote in his journal, "To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, either in this life or in the life to come." Successful coupling is more difficult in modern times when we no longer need a spouse for the basics of survival but, in the end, falling in love was never really about survival. It is about meaning, and who couldn't use more meaning in life, ...
Feb 09, 2025•20 min
This week's inauguration of Donald Trump was painful for most if not all of our listeners. Still, short of resignation, illness, or an implausible impeachment, his chaotic administration will be a threatening fact of life for the world for four more years. How then can we adapt ourselves to a reality we wanted so desperately to never face? How do we protest or resist his insanity while trying, at the same time, to heal the lethal divide of our nation?
Jan 26, 2025•17 min
If Trump keeps his campaign promise to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the USA, we should prepare ourselves for some economic and service industry hits and we are not going to like. Acknowledging that our immigration system is broken and than neither a coast to coast wall or an open border is a workable solution, what can we do to fix this problem which is crucial to our future as a nation?
Jan 12, 2025•18 min
We are entering a new year with the single glaring feature of the return of Donald Trump to the presidency which will have far reaching implications both domestically and internationally. For most of us, this is a future to fear and yet, for good or for ill, we must face the reality we have been given, regardless of the future we had hoped for. So, now what? I say that we refuse to surrender and commit ourselves to the roll we progressives know best: resistance.
Dec 29, 2024•17 min
How Christmas is celebrated has evolved a great deal through the centuries but most of us alive today inherited a very churchy version of Christmas that focused on the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke and the whole incarnational theology of the ancient church. Modern progressives find it more uncomfortable to fit into those beliefs than an ugly Christmas sweater. If we demythologize the birth narratives we may be able to find merit in some of the Christmas traditions without all of the phony...
Dec 15, 2024•20 min
A prophet is not someone who predicts the future. A prophet is a person, religious or not, who accurately describes the present, even if no one wants to hear it. There is a saying in journalism that says journalism happens when you publish something that someone doesn’t want published. Everything else is just advertising. The ancient prophets were the ones who could speak truth to the monarchy, to the priesthood, and to the marketplace, especially when they didn’t want to hear it. We don’t have ...
Dec 01, 2024•22 min
Climate change is not merely a matter of either science or politics. Wealthy people don’t tend to live in mobile home parks, after all, so the stronger hurricanes and tornadoes have a direct impact on those who are forced by economics to live in the least substantial housing. We must do more than open our hearts and wallets to participate in relief efforts. We need to “go upstream and see who keeps throwing all of these poor people into the river.”
Nov 17, 2024•14 min
It is not hyperbole to say that our election on Tuesday is probably the most important election in our life times. In fact, it is entirely possible that this could turn out to be the last free election held in the United States if the anti-democracy wing of the Republican Party gain the reigns of power. We have been subjected to increasingly insane political lies during the campaign as Donald Trump and JD Vance attempt to use fear to motivate voters. We can only hope that voters who are able to ...
Nov 03, 2024•16 min
In light of the recent assassination attempts against Donald Trump, in which the infamous AR-15 assault style rife was used, it seems like a good time to raise the issue of passing much needed gun reform legislation. The majority of Americans want sensible gun laws passed and yet we keep re-electing politicians who refuse to give us what we want. What about this – what if we stopped voting for candidates who won’t do what we want and started voting for candidates who will?
Oct 20, 2024•18 min
We have arrived at the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the war drags on and even threatens to escalate. The Israeli response has, for many, overshadowed the horror of the original attack. The world is asked to witness a problem with no evident solutions, endlessly debating who is to blame while hostages, at least the few who have survived, continue to be daily raped, tortured, beaten, starved, and held in inhumane circumstances. What now?
Oct 06, 2024•23 min
We cannot feign surprise at the outrageous and hypocritical misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, but isn't it a shame that we are still having to fight this fight in 2024? Women have fought for a place at the table in law schools, medical schools, and in America's pulpits with a great deal more success than they have had in executive and legislative politics. Since this is clearly not because of some inherent deficit in leadership skills, what else can we call it but the fear that weak men have ...
Sep 22, 2024•22 min
When Louisiana's new governor, Jeff Landry, signed an order that every state classroom from Kindergarten through university classrooms would have to post a poster sized copy of the Ten Commandments, you probably heard a voice in your head saying, "What an idiot." But what if he wasn't just trying to make culture war news and appeal to his base of conservative voters. What if he is, in fact, cueing up the Supreme Court for their next unbelievable reversal of settled law. Anyone else feeling that ...
Sep 08, 2024•20 min
All of the world’s religions promote compassion towards the poor as a central spiritual value. However, it should be noted that the world’s major religions all were born in times of great scarcity of resources. It was impossible to prevent poverty because there simply was not enough resources to lift everyone up to a decent standard of living. However, in the modern world, scarcity is not the issue. Our problem is an economic system that allows for the hoarding of resources in the hands of a few...
Aug 25, 2024•28 min
“Why do the innocent suffer? And can we consider as well how many who are clearly victims are also unconsciously coconspirators in their abuse? Just as Bob Marley sang, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds,” we all must consider the ways in which we have failed to take responsibility to allowing or even empowering those who have caused us pain. We should have tons of compassion for all of those who suffer unjustly, but it is also important for us to b...
Aug 11, 2024•23 min
In the hope that Donald Trump will win the November election, the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has composed a huge book of plans and resumes to transform our government called the 2025 Project. It is 900 pages long and too much for any one news show or religious podcast to treat comprehensively but this message attempts to take a pastoral view of the changes this powerful minority would like to impose on the USA. This may serve as a good introduction to your own study of the...
Jul 28, 2024•18 min
What makes some topics controversial is because you can make a rational defense of either side of the issue. For example, you can mount logical arguments in favor of either socialism or capitalism but you cannot have a reasonable debate about whether the Earth is round or flat. Unfortunately, we often fail to have the needed rational debates that help us to grow and learn because we have become afraid of the kind of divisive fighting that crops up around subjects for which there really isn't a l...
Jul 14, 2024•21 min
The news has been uncommonly full of conversations about who lied and about what. Hunter Biden lied on his application to buy a hand gun. Michael Cohen lied about lots of things, specifically around the hush money payment made to an adult film actress to remain silent about her sexual encounter with Donald Trump. But it goes a lot deeper than that, with rampant conspiracy theories and obviously false narratives created to gain political sympathy or to provide political cover. Isn't it about time...
Jun 30, 2024•27 min
The gloves are off, at least in the left leaning media, as we now hear the Trump base regularly being referred to as a "cult." That's strong language that should not be used lightly but does the "shoe fit?" This message asks us to consider the diagnostic criteria for identifying any movement as a cult and to apply these criteria to ourselves.
Jun 16, 2024•27 min
Most progressive church goers have been exposed to academic criticism of the New Testament, especially as concerns the nature of the historical Jesus. After all, the Jesus Seminar has been around for 40 years, giving us those wonderful books by Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, and Jon Dominic Crossan. Still, I have marveled at how church members can leave a brilliant lecture about the historical Jesus and in minutes, default to a kind of 4th century creedal set of beliefs about J...
Jun 02, 2024•26 min
When we watch a movie like Star Wars, we immediately know that it is fiction. No one tries to hitch a ride on the Millennium Falcon or tries to order a working light saber from Amazon. Sadly, however, many modern religious people read biblical myths as if talking with a snake in the Garden of Eden or following Moses through a divided Red Sea is something that actually happened. This sermon attempts to help us all to interrogate the myths that help us to define morality in the modern world....
May 19, 2024•25 min
