FROM THE PASTOR’S PEN Friends, As I write this I confess that my attention is a little bit divided: I’m sitting in my kitchen waiting for someone to come fix my hot water heater and Mark Zuckerberg is in Washington D.C., testifying before congress on matters related to Facebook’s misuse of massive amounts of digital information—and both of my distractions make me…

Friends, Chad DeWitt is a member of Montclair Presbyterian Church and he is an architect whose design firm, Framestudio, has employed a marvelous expression of Calvinism in an effort to recruit a new architect for employment: Wherever the contest takes place, I am in favor of any effort to combat ugliness, and what I like about Chad’s employment opportunity slogan is that…

Dear Friends, In my last Contact piece, I mentioned that I was going to spiritualize my daily task of driving kinds to school. My hope was that by turning drive into a spiritual event I would be transformed into some kind of stalwart spiritual being, with a soul deeply rooted in the divine. That hasn’t happened yet (though there are still a…

Friends, When I was maybe twelve years old a student form San Francisco Theological Seminary came to my hometown to work as a intern at my church. There are a lot of things I remember about her: she had a VW Rabbit with a sun roof and vanity plates, for example, and she grew up spending her summers on Nantucket, and claimed…

Dear Friends, A poet of a bygone era once asked, Do you believe in Rock-n-Roll,                                                                                               …

Friends, My Contact message this week begins with a recommendation: if you subscribe to Netflix, or use iTunes or Amazon, please consider watching a documentary film called The Overnighters. The Overnighters chronicles a the ministry of a Missouri Synod (which is to say conservative) Lutheran pastor in North Dakota, who opened his church’s facilities to house itinerate and homeless men looking for…

Friends, Happy new year! Or will it be?  Traditionally, the new year is a time to look forward with longing and a hope that the coming year will be better than the one just past, and while I don’t want to presume to know how everyone reading these words feels about the past year, I know I speak for a lot of…

Friends, Those wanting a simple and straightforward statement about why peacemaking is necessary in the Modern world need look no further than the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize lecture in which Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the prize-wining International Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, made an observation that is both scary and true: The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending,…

Dear Friends, This Sunday marks the beginning of Advent, the four weeks that lead up to and prepare us for the celebration of Christmas. For the most part, Advent is a season of joyful anticipation. After all, Christmas music is on the radio, mistletoe is tacked to door frames, the trees are trimmed and the malls are decked with holly and holiday…