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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

As an aspiring author I’ve been getting better acquainted with my audience, and it’s an audience I find it easy to self-identify with (Christian ministerial credentials aside).  A poll recently released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been helpful. People without a religious affiliation- the so-called “nones” who represent a large…

“Doing what you’re doing- writing a book- is like running naked through the town square,” a friend of mine recently remarked. Thankfully, we don’t have much of a “town square” where I live in downtown Atlanta; and, besides, in the gritty, adjacent neighborhood of East Atlanta, where I do much of my writing hunkered over…

NPR’s Teri Gross recently interviewed the comedian, Chris Rock, on “Fresh Air.”  A friend and fellow T.A. in Intro to Homiletics with Tom Long mentioned the exchange yesterday for its application to preaching (we preacher types are interested in these sorts of things): apparently Rock credits old-time preachers, from his grandfather to contemporaries Joel Osteen…

Reading the book, The Beautiful Wife, by author and speaker Sandy Ralya, whose agenda to save so-called “biblical marriage” seems a bit dubious from the start, feels like the times I’ve been asked to buckle up during a spate of turbulence on airplanes and find myself absent-mindedly checking for the barf bag in the seat in…

“This nation is the hope of the earth,” Republican candidate Mitt Romney said in passionate closing remarks at last night’s third and final presidential debate. The statement for a moment filled me with great pride, and maybe I’m not alone.  I suspect most voters like to hear that the country they love really is the…

We sang this song by the band, Gungor, in worship yesterday.  Here is this week’s musical feature, “Beautiful Things,” with the hope that your day will be beautiful, regardless of what you carry into it:   

King of Pops Grace The little girl has her popsicle. Strawberry lemonade. She won’t share. Can’t I have a taste?, Mommy whines; her wallet is now empty. A young man is selling hot dogs. They’ve never met, but he has noticed: Hey, go and tell Brianna that this King of Pops is on me. He…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way…but then again, nothing worth doing usually ever is.  Today longtime Catholic nun Diane Dougherty is being ordained just miles from my home in Atlanta’s First Metropolitan Community Church.  Doughterty’s ordination will not be recognized by the male authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, but for Doughterty, today’s commissioning…

Yesterday Christians for Biblical Equality produced a list of various ways that churches can proactively address the problem of domestic violence both within congregations and the greater community. Rev. Anne O. Weatherholt, who is rector of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Maryland, and in 2008 authored the book, Breaking the Silence: The Church Responds to Domestic Violence, a…

Every so often I become afraid that what I am doing with my life is totally irrelevant. It happened yesterday.  I had shown up on the doorstep of the home of a hospice patient for a previously scheduled appointment.  Only two days earlier we had agreed on that day and that time, and so there…
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