Someone, anyone, please, take the high road. Our whole social structure is disintegrating as schism, division, separation, polarization, and enmity become the new normal. “Normal” shares a significant number of letters with “moral”, and we are quickly adopting a morality of hate, hostility, contempt, retribution, aggression, violence, and disdain. It […]
I am adding a fourth peace focus to peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping – peacespeaking. I do this with a sense of bewilderment. People’s United Methodist Church adopted as its annual theme, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers (for they shall be called children of God).” I did not expect the response this […]
I love research. I love learning and the process of transforming data into usable, understandable, reasonable, and verifiable information that builds knowledge that is fair, just, rational, and useful that ages well and becomes accepted wisdom. I read footnotes. I look up original sources. I care deeply about verification, documentation, […]
With apologies to Tom Wolfe, there is a sad parallel of his societal commentary of the 1980s to the current deterioration of the Christian faith in the 2020s. It isn’t that there isn’t interest and passion in Christianity; it is that there are so many uneducated and ill-informed versions of […]
Why do some “certain people” not want other “certain people” to be loved, recognized, and respected for who they are? Why are some “certain people” so ready and willing to condemn other “certain people” of sin while ignoring their own? Why have some “certain people” worked so hard to deny […]
Getting older comes with all kinds of surprises, most of them not so good. There is the natural slowing down that happens to everyone, but there is also a random lottery of “you may be a lucky winner” blindsides that simply suck. I had one of those a few weeks […]
Folks, this isn’t politics. In our firecracker, hyper-sensitive, reactive/radioactive, hostile, everyone-is-an-enemy culture, it is nearly impossible to talk about a politician without it being viewed as a partisan rant/attack/character assassination. This is too bad, especially when our politicians hold absolutely no qualms about passing themselves off as experts in fields […]
What happens when we confuse a faith system with fear? The two are antithetical and mix like oil and water. The basic and naive assumption is that our faith will be greater than our fear, and that fear has absolutely no power over faith. But I am not talking about […]
We pick up our conversation with Peter Block, emphasizing the importance of changing the narrative we live by from one of deficiency and need to one of sufficiency and giftedness. Peacemaking can’t be done for others. True peacemaking can only be done with others. Enjoy this concluding entry in our […]
I have no idea whether the concept of “inference categories” ever caught on, but I read a book (whose titles I cannot remember for the life of me) years ago that used this construct and I have found it valuable ever since. It is a concept that fills in a […]
United Methodeviations 