Luke 18:1-8 Dear Partner in Preaching, Where has the persistent widow showed up in your life? Or, maybe better, who has been the persistent widow in your life? Perhaps it was an advocate for LGBT inclusion, motivated by the love of a gay son or daughter who is always pushing you to move your congregation to a more inclusive welcome sooner than you – charged with keeping the congregation together and therefore leery of divisive issues – were ready. Or maybe it’s the parent of a special-needs kid, asking – and, honestly, it probably feels more like demanding – more accommodation for his or her child than your congregation...

Luke 9:51-62 Dear Partner in Preaching, I find this such a particularly hard passage to preach because I am so incredibly disappointed, shocked, and confused by the violent instinct of James and John. It’s easy to skip over the first half of this passage in a hurry to get to the easier moralism of “stop letting things get in the way of following Jesus.” But the details are worth tarrying over: Jesus has set his face for Jerusalem and so will let nothing deter him from embracing the cross that awaits him there. He travels through a portion of Samaria and the residents of a Samaritan village don’t receive him because “his face...

We all probably have our short list of the great dangers our world faces. Indeed, since the development and use of the atomic bomb, psychologists have talked about the “free-floating” anxiety of our time, an unnamed but nearly all-pervasive concern about the fate of ourselves and the world. So what’s on your list? Environmental degradation? Diminishing fossil fuels and other natural resources? Overwhelming poverty? The chance of devastating war? Certainly those are all on my list, too. But above all of them is my concern that we are increasingly living fractured lives, disconnected from each other and all too-often...

I’ll start at the end of this 12-minute, intriguing TED Talk. Daniel Reisel, a neuroscientist who has studied the brains of socio-paths, asks us whether we should be concerned not only about changing the brains of criminals but also our own. I find the whole idea of changing our brains – and along with our brains our character and potential – simply fascinating because that idea emerges at the intersection of two deeply held beliefs. On the one hand, we often think of character as something that can be developed and so we stress moral and character development in our schools and churches and civic associations alike. On the other hand,...

Anyone who has read this blog for long knows that I’m a huge fan of Brené Brown. I love her work on the centrality of vulnerability to authentic living. So I was delighted to see on her blog that the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA for short) recently hosted Brené for a presentation and then illustrated a portion of her talk. RSA Animated Shorts are a delightful way to bring a concept or idea to life and invite us to see it differently. The portion illustrated below is about empathy. One of her key findings is that empathy – the willingness to go where someone else is living...