02166 – What Hope is, is Not

Hope is never calibrated to the fervor of optimism or the distress of pessimism. Hope is fixed to a larger horizon and rooted in an expansive memory. Hope cannot be auctioned off to the highest bidder; cannot be put up for collateral; cannot be traded on the big board...

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02093 – Stay in Your Lane, Please

I want to write a longer piece about those bishops who seek to keep some from the table of Christ, but for now I will say this: it is not your table (nor mine). Bishops, priests, etc. are neither the hosts nor the bouncers nor the ones who wrote the guest list. The...

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01776 – A New Friendship

Many new friends have come into my life...Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, and others—including lots of atheists and agnostics, too. One of the most dramatic of those friendships began in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Like a lot of churches, our little...

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00225 – Hospitality is Key

What do we experience by eating together? We share the host’s hospitality. And hospitality is at the core of our spiritual life. Most of our day is spent experiencing how we are different from one another—our race, our economic status, our education, our language, our...

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00193 – Guests, Not Hosts

If our churches aren’t very inclusive, it might be because too many of us have mistaken ourselves for the Giver of the Feast. We’re not hosts extending invitations. We’re guests among guests. Yet we behave as if having arrived earlier than others has given us...

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