It’s amazing how inspiration can come in the most ordinary moments. Most recently for me, it was during my morning commute into downtown Washington, DC. As I watched the US Capitol Building gleaming in the morning sunlight, a powerful sense of peace and calm covered me like a blanket. Without warning, I found myself seated in the presence of …
When Jesus entered Jerusalem, it was a big deal. The city was packed with pilgrims who had come to celebrate the Passover. The occupying Roman army was on high alert, well-aware that insurrection was common during the days of the festival. The air was electric as devout Jews from across the diaspora gathered together in the city …
When I first became a Quaker, I thought that the point of my faith was to experience God’s presence. If I wasn’t experiencing regular encounters with the Holy Spirit, something was wrong. More recently, such experience – the sense of spiritual ecstasy and mystical states of consciousness – has become much less central to my faith. Instead, …
Life isn’t simple. Despite all of the ways in which we try to control our path – all the academic, work, and social hoops we jump through to provide order to our lives – the world we live in is fundamentally disorderly. How do you distinguish between the good and the bad? Or, even more challenging, how …
You don’t get these days back. You can’t buy the future with the present, and you can’t escape it by running into the past. It’s now or never. Everything hinges on this moment you’re living, right now. You have no time but this present time. These joys and sorrows, these sights and sounds, these choices you …
This weekend, those of us on the East Coast of the United States got several feet of snow dumped on us. It’s one of the biggest blizzards ever recorded in this part of the world, and it’s quite a sight to behold. Here in Washington, DC, we’re not used to this kind of weather. We …
When I was about twelve years old, I went through a phase when I was terribly afraid of hell. Like, wake-up-screaming scared of hell. Shouting-at-the-ceiling-because-God-won’t-answer afraid of damnation. My parents probably thought I was mentally ill, but that wasn’t quite right. I was living in a persistent state of spiritual terror. Somewhere along the way (maybe at …
Read more “I Want to Follow Jesus. Do I Need to Be Baptized?”