Anabaptist and Quaker essays, sermons, and other writings
I share two poems centering my Palestinian identity and experience. As a Palestinian Christian, I aspire to walk in Jesus’ footsteps in challenging oppression, empire, and occupation. I provide an introduction to Palestine for readers to better understand the context of the poems. I first provide a brief introduction to […]
For the last 8 months, I have been engaging in a daily ritual of prayer and worship with the Iona Community. The Iona Community is an international, ecumenical Christian movement based on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. The community was founded in 1938 by Reverend […]
Introduction This was a sermon preached on my first Sunday back after maternity leave. That week as I transitioned back into ministry, I found myself reflecting on my new dual roles: mother to my new son Leo and pastor to Pomona Fellowship Church of the Brethren. I have been the […]
For as long as I can remember, my mother and father have had an incredible ability to identify any bird that they see. This includes all of the typical songbirds you find in rural Pennsylvania, chickadees, wrens, robins, etc; but also the occasional red-tailed hawk, falcon perched on a power […]
Wrestling Patience I am being taught patience. When my first few kidney stones came around, I struggled to muster the strength to silence the pain in my body. In all of my eight years of life, I had never known the world as such a painful place. I had never […]
Last February, I had the opportunity to explore Zion Nation Park in southern Utah. My sister is a park ranger and spent last winter at, what locals simply call “Zions,” and so my wife and I drove down from our home in Washington State to visit. It is truly an […]
A man, masked in the guise of some immortal earth spirit, rumbles in his deep baritone a song as he comes onto the improvised stage, to an audience of some fifty theopoets and scholars. His hair is moss; his eyes shine through the hip-bone holes of some vernal skeleton, the […]
The following poem was written as the author reflected on receiving her level 1 trainer certification in Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation. A Pagan, she nonetheless weeps for those whom Jesus weeps and actively seeks a day when justice will roll like […]
My journey with the Death Row pen pal project began with a seminar led by Rachel Gross at our church about four years ago. Prison ministry was something that was drawing my heart, but I wasn’t sure how to get involved until Rachel opened the door. There were so many […]
This sonnet by Travis Poling was composed to bear witness to the bombing of an open-air market in Iraq in 2007 Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad, March 2007 By Travis Poling By chance the sky was calm that morning. Locals milled through the open street, browsed books, turned pages, visioned worlds beyond […]