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…

Friends, On Sunday I left directly from Celebration so that I could drive to Marin County in time to participate in a symposium on Jewish/Muslim relations, which was a little bit strange (and wonderful) since I am neither Jewish nor Muslim. In fact, I was the only Christian participating in an official capacity (and by “official capacity” I mean that I shared…

Friends, I wrote this Contact  piece while sitting outside on my back deck, drinking a cold beer. It was about eighty degrees out, which might not have been terribly remarkable, if it weren’t six thirty in the evening, on the night of the first game of the World Series (1-1, top of the sixth, Kershaw on the mound, as I write these…

This is a slightly edited version of an open letter to the men on my Facebook feed, which I wrote in response to the “Me Too” posts women have been putting up on social media. The “Me Too” posts began as a response to revelations of filmmaker Harvey Weinstein’s sexual violence, abuse, and harassment against women in the entertainment industry. Friends, For…