A note: In 2003, or thereabouts, I got a contract from Beliefnet.com to write an article about the Fellowship (also known as the Family), a secretive, religious organization with which I had a brief affiliation while I was a student at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. When Beliefnet asked me to write about the Fellowship, I was an aspiring author, and…

Friends, For this week’s Contact installment, I want to mention two items, both of which are related to travel at MPC. First, I want to re-extend an invitation to anyone interested in traveling to Spain with me next April. On this journey we will be spending a week together learning about the convivencia, a period of several hundred years during which, under…

Friends, In my sermon on Sunday I told a bear story, and I discovered after celebration that a lot of folks have bear stories. So I’m sharing one more bear story here. It’s actually the same story I told, but from a different perspective. This is how my son, William, told the story in a skit he wrote for our MPC@Tahoe Talent/No…

Please click on this link to see Pastor Ben’s article from this week’s Contact.

Friends, Earlier this week I took a tour of the Mormon Temple with my friend, Jim Bennett, who is a Presbyterian minister and Professor of American Religious history at Santa Clara University.  After enjoying a nice lunch in the Woodminster district, Jim and I walked down to the temple and sauntered around the grounds, waiting for our tour’s appointed time. We looked…

Friends, Writing in the May 2019 edition of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Beha reintroduced me to “Learning In War-Time,” a sermon that C. S. Lewis preached in October of 1939, just after the United Kingdom’s entrance into the Second World War. Apparently, as the war got underway, there was a sense among many students and professors at Oxford that it was necessary to…

Friends, This Sunday I will celebrate Cinco de Mayo by preaching a sermon on gratitude.[1] And while I don’t yet know what I’m going to say in that sermon, it seems important to lay the groundwork for the sermon by distinguishing between two different kinds of gratitude. The first kind of gratitude is designed to stifle aspiration and liberation. It is gratitude…

Friends, What follows below is a column I have written as a guest columnist for The Piedmont Post. The column comes out next week, so I chose an Easter theme. God’s Peace, Ben An Easter Evolution Back when I was younger and a bit more zealous, the Christian celebration of Easter was something I used to separate myself from those I deemed…

Friends, I wrote this on Tuesday, which, like Monday before it, was a rainy spring day. Springtime rain is not something we get to experience much in California, so I always consider April rain to be a treat, even after a long, wet winter. I love rain that falls on days when it isn’t too cold. I love how drops of moisture…

Friends, On March 18th, the last Monday of winter, we had a brief moment of summer weather. There was no rain, the thermometer peaked at 77 degrees outside, and the wind was only a whisper. It was a perfect day for sitting outside and doing nothing, which I did for a spell under the oak tree in my back yard. When I…