Render Unto Caesar

In his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman interprets the life of Jesus as a story about how to survive and thrive as an oppressed person.  I'm taking a course specifically focused on Thurman, taught by the remarkable Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake.  Last week he said something that has had me thinking a lot about my own ministry and work in the world.

Dorsey was talking about the idea that it is easy to deceive ourselves, to stray from the path of our heart and soul with the compromises of success.
We rationalize:

I will just take this job (this raise, this promotion) but only to

gain the power or money I need to do the good work I plan to do.  

We compromise and slowly drift away until we no longer remember who what our values were.  This is one of the things Thurman is talking about in this book.

Public Theology

Earlier in the month, I took a week long intensive course with Dr. Hubert Locke called Speaking Truth to Power.  The class was about public theology, which Dr. Locke defined as what happens when a religious leader speaks, not to their congregation, but to the greater public about political issues of the day. Rooted in their spiritual knowledge and authority, historically this happened in Op-Ed pieces or letters to the editor. Classic examples of public theologians are folks like Reinhold Niebuhr or Martin Luther King, Jr.  The public theologian is alive and well today, though there has been a shift away from the slowly declining print media.  Now you are more like to find her blogging.

Labels and Mixed Faith Spirituality

In the beginning of his book, "Living Buddha, Living Christ", Thich Nhat Hahn says, "To me, religious life is life.  We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.  When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result."  As a man well known for his deep and lifelong commitment to peace, this is clearly a very foundational belief for Nhat Hahn.

The Pagan Eucharist??

Would it surprise you to know that many pagan traditions have an aspect to our rituals that is very much like the Eucharist?  For the pagans out there, have you ever considered how similar Cakes and Ale is both symbolically and physically to the tradition of Christian Communion?  In yet another installment of my current seminary inspired series, "Hey!  We do that!  Wait, you do that too??", I figured it was time to talk about the Eucharist.

You say Savior, I say Sun King

I live in a row of old apartment buildings in Astoria, NY.  Just across the East River of Manhattan, my Queens apartment is relatively affordable and spacious.  The buildings butt up directly to one another, creating a corridor down our street and a continuous line of rooftops.  It was up on my roof (four stories up) where I had my winter solstice ritual this morning.

Karen Armstrong

As this transition has come into my life, a few of my friends have made recommendation for scholastic theology books that I might be interested in.  My good friend Sarah suggested that I look into Karen Armstrong, a writer in the field of comparative religion