Anabaptist and Quaker essays, sermons, and other writings
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves. – George Eliot, Middlemarch Look up, Friends. Over your head hovers a crown of everlasting life. – But that’s right, you don’t see it, do you? We know it’s there, […]
One of the most significant themes from Hebrew scripture that many Christians overlook is that of the land–a land with which God promises to bless the people. Perhaps that aversion contains some awareness of just how problematic it has been when Christians have laid claim to some of those “land” […]
In a lot of the scholarship on homiletics – the study of preaching, its approaches and methods – Christian preachers are enjoined to have in our uppermost consciousness the imperative to preach the Good News, to ask, of each passage of scripture on which we are called to preach, what […]
I still remember an insight from Stanley Hauerwas’s commencement speech at Eastern Mennonite Seminary over a decade ago. He said something to the effect that learning how to be a Christian is not just like learning to speak a new language. It is speaking a new language. Christianity is its […]
Think about a time when you were first in love. That dreamy feeling, like the whole world was singing to you, that you had found the secret of life, the universe, and everything, and the most wonderful person in existence was crazy about YOU! Thinking about how lovely it was […]
This sermon was originally delivered to Moorseville Friends Church on First Day, Sixth Month 13th, 2021. “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people,” said the angel of the annunciation. Quaker theologian Robert Barclay (1648-1690) argued that “if this coming of Christ had […]
Like many Mennonites, Hutterites, and Amish my grandparents kept a copy of the Martyrs Mirror on their bookshelf. It’s a massive book, over fifteen hundred pages long, so it stood out among the other books, It was first published in 1660. Now 360 years later, it is still available in […]
Beatitude: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the beatitude that I am most nervous to speak about. I’m not nervous because it is a topic that involves actual physical harm. I’m nervous because of all the beatitudes, this […]
When I was 22, I attended a women’s cabaret in Minneapolis, where I was then living. One of the performers mentioned Camp Sister Spirit, a feminist retreat center in rural Mississippi that was in need of help – not just funds, but volunteers to help in the work of renovating […]
For much of the Christian Church, today is Pentecost Sunday. It commemorates the day when the Holy Spirit, previously breathed into the eleven disciples by the risen Christ1, fell upon ten dozen assembled believers2. Peter, standing among them, explained to astonished bystanders that this was the “outpouring of God’s spirit […]