Dear Friends, At a public art installation in Saint Louis (where I was attending a conference a few weeks back) I was able to take a picture of myself taking a picture of myself. It was a selfie within a selfie. Here is the picture: In my more pessimistic moments, I worry that this photograph is a metaphor for what’s wrong with…

Dear Friends, On Tuesday morning I woke up at six thirty and I walked outside to get the paper.  I was greeted with the wonderful smell of rain. To my mind—or maybe it’s more accurate to say to my olfactory capacities—there is nothing quite like the smell of rain, especially the smell of the season’s first rain. There are lots of reasons…

Friends, For Contact this week my plan was to write something about the Kavanaugh hearings and about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has come forward with a story about how the nominee for the Supreme Court sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers. I was going to tie that story to a story about how the Dallas police department found…

Dear friends, For the past year or so, a group of MPC folks have been meeting to talk about formulating some kind or faith-based response to the Trump presidency. One of the results of that conversation was an open letter to Donald Trump, which is copied below. At its summer meeting the Session of MPC voted to sign letter as a body.…

Friends, Three years ago, at an outdoor celebration in August, I preached a sermon about the need to talk about issues of faith and war and peace before our nation sends our children off to fight in the next big war. It was an amazing experience for me. The last time I had preached a serious peacenik sermon—after the US invasion of…

Friends, While I was on study leave during the first half of July, I spent time at a retreat center in Spain where we talked about Benedictine spirituality as a pathway to peace. It was a good retreat.   Benedictine spirituality is a Christian tradition that began in the early years of the sixth century of the Common Era, and it is…

Friends, I wrote these words on the first day of 2018 that felt too hot to be in my office. I turned on my ceiling fan, opened my windows and let myself sweat, just a bit. I always feel a surge of optimism at the beginning of the summer. Once the weather gets warmish I dream of months to come when I…

What follows below is an edited and somewhat altered transcript of remarks I made at a Ramadan open house/Iftar meal at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California on May 26. –Ben Daniel A few years ago, Maha Elganaidi[i] and I were in Sunnyvale, doing an onstage conversation about Islam together, and at that event, a significant portion of the audience became…

Dear Friends,  After a weekend of nearly constant Jumble sale action here at the church, I decided I needed to discover the origins of the proverb “many hands make light work.” It wasn’t such an easy task. My various web searches told me the proverb’s provenance was either a) unknown, b) Zimbabwean, or c) English and first recorded by John Heywood in…

Friends, I am writing in the pastoral Contact space this week because even though it is her turn to write, Talitha is away, spending the week at Zephyr Point on the shores of Lake Tahoe, which reminds me: who wants to join me at Zephyr Point on the shores of Lake Tahoe during the last week of June? Between June 24 and…