Friends, As I was fighting writer’s block, looking for inspiration for this week’s contact piece, I came across the news that a certain prominent American politician had called for laws banning all Muslims from immigrating to the United States. Now, because this is a church publication I am not allowed to name said politician, lest by my criticism of him, we lose…

Now it’s my turn to say something about the “War on Christmas,” and by this I’m not referencing the use of spiritually-neutral seasonal greetings such as “Happy Holidays” (I’m content anytime anyone says anything nice to me), and this isn’t a rant against the commercialization of the season (now that Thanksgiving has come and gone I’m thrilled to see shops and streets…

This coming Sunday marks the beginning of Advent, the season when we prepare our hearts and souls for the celebration of Jesus’ birth. This will be my 22nd Advent as a pastor and in all of those years, I doubt a December has ever come and gone without someone asking why we, in the Church, cannot get along with the early celebration…

Ben will return next week.

Friends, I hope you will forgive me if, in my Contact space this week, I take another celebratory rhetorical victory lap in response to the music we had in celebration last Sunday. It was amazing. We are blessed. After church on Sunday, I got to thinking about the connection between social justice and the use of beautiful music in worship, and it…

It’s been a long drought, but deep in the repository of my memories there is archived a recollection that during wet years, which is to say those years when the rainfall was normal or better than average, the winter’s first precipitation comes on Halloween or thereabout. This may be more of a superstition than a precise record of actual fact — like…

Last week I spent the better part of four days in Knoxville, Tennessee, at a national gathering of Presbyterians on the campus of the University of Tennessee. We held meetings in university classrooms, we ate in one of the university’s dining halls and we worshiped in the shadow of Neyland Stadium, home of the UT Volunteers football team, a structure impressive for…

I’ve spent most of the last three weeks on vacation, eight days of which I was in Hawaii. My family stayed on Maui, just north of Lahaina where life centers around and caters to the needs of tourists, but one day I slipped out of vacation mode, and took a day of study leave. I caught an early-morning ferry to the Island…

Since last fall’s Black Lives Matter protests here in Oakland I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about race. In particular, I have found those voices within the African American community, who are asking White Americans to have a conversation about race to be moving and compelling, and so, as part of an ongoing conversation about race, I’d like to offer…

The beginning of June is an interesting time of year. School is not yet out, but all the academic learning pretty much is wrapped up (at least for the children who live at my house). The apricots, peaches and nectarines look beautiful, and they’re starting to smell good, too, but they’re still hard and sour. The weather cannot decide if it’s a…