Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 12 seconds When the white evangelical man voted for Trump, he was not being hypocritical, only compulsive. He honestly wants to believe he is following the Bible he worships, and if he stubbornly continues to defend Trump and his ilk with righteous indignation, it is perhaps to shut out a…

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 21 seconds.   This post is about the white evangelical man. If the term is gender-specific, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the females, nor are they white-collar people in the usual, college-graduate sense of…

I am an encourager. It is who I am at the core of my being. I value reading deep and wide—time-honored classics, philosophy (with an emphasis on the American transcendentalists and the existentialists), psychology, fiction, biography, and current events. I do my best to practice the lost art of empathic listening. To fully hear and…

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 15 seconds. It is bad for America to be divided into “two sides.”   It is bad for Democrats to be working without coming to grips with a painful reckoning of the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future…

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 39 seconds.  “Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion” by Dr. Marlene Winell Psychologist Marlene Winell is known for coining the term Religious Trauma Syndrome. Leaving the Fold is a book that examines the effects of authoritarian religion (fundamentalist Christianity in particular) on individuals who leave…

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 21 seconds. I spent a portion of time yesterday at Cinqwani, our sacred ground on the southern ridge of Kalien commemorating the Winter Solstice. I have constructed a giant Mandala (aka Native American Medicine Wheel) of rocks gathered from every corner of our land. It is pictured below. Seasonal changes…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 59 seconds It was at an emergent church conference in the early 2000s when I first heard Doug Pagitt use the term deconstructing religion. He convincingly talked in heady terms about actively disassociating from our roots in conservative, evangelical Christianity and “deconstructing” contemporary expressions of Christianity. In an interview with PBS…

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 3 seconds. The questions began in 1980 at the Southern Baptist Church in which I served as a naive 22-year-old minister of music when the pastor preached a sermon one fateful Sunday evening entitled “Why Doubting God Is A Sin.” Always a voracious reader, I was also in my second year…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 36 seconds. A few nights ago, my new friends, Heath and Adam, asked me if I ever had the desire to sing again. When I replied with an immediate no, they asked why. I did not have an answer that evening, but their question has caused me to examine the issue…

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 43 seconds. Long-time friends were over for dinner at our beach cottage a few nights ago, and as we enjoyed conversation and cocktails before the meal, we mentioned that coffee hour and cocktail hour conversations were non-negotiable for Gina and me. Our friend inquired, “Every day? That is hard to fathom…

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 52 seconds. The second most enchanting place of my life was the Goodwill store on Dodds Avenue in Chattanooga. I’ll never forget the way it smelled walking through the door. A thick, oppressive must would hit you in the face. For an imaginative boy, it was an ever-present reminder that the…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 28 seconds.   The pristine island of St. John in the Virgin Islands, the majestic Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains of Australia, the picturesque Resurrection Bay in Alaska, the artistic Montmartre overlooking Paris, and the iconic Villa Cipriani in Asolo, Italy, are five of the many enchanting places of…

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 12 seconds. I have lived a charmed life. By anyone’s standards, but certainly for someone who grew up in the poverty and illiteracy of Appalachia. My childhood was beyond poor. I remember having cowpeas and stale bread (we would have to scratch the mold off) for weeks on end and…

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 26 seconds. If you follow me closely on social networks, you may have noticed an increase in post content intensity over the past few weeks. There is a method to the madness. Over the past two weeks, I have unfriended over 200 people that I no longer consider life-giving. In…

Reading Time: 2 minutes and 27 seconds. I believe we should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, rage, sing, dramatize, and deny. I do not believe that shooting people, bombing, murdering, burning, shaming, judging, drowning, threatening, bullying, or name-calling will work to contain ideologies or opinions that you do not like. On Facebook, I…

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 57 seconds. Christians, by their very nature, are less literate than the general public. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it, to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, and they are less able to change the world in which they find…

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 53 seconds. For as long as I can remember I longed to find a better life outside of my tiny rural growing up place—to free myself from the bonds of my family and from the restrictions of a poor education. That visceral and intellectual ache for freedom permeated my body and…

I firmly believe people (especially white evangelical males) who still support Trump and his agenda are not true Christians and according to their own beliefs, their name will be taken out of the book of life. According to Revelation 22:19: “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this…

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 21 seconds.  On 23 January 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump caused controversy when he stated the following during a campaign rally in Iowa:   “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”   With Kavanaugh poised to win confirmation to the Supreme…

A Fleeting Moment Where Becoming Takes Place A couple of sentences set the context for this captivating book. “‘Become what you are’: has been described as ‘the most haunting of Nietzsche’s haunting aphorisms.’” “As it turns out, to ‘become who you are’ is not about finding a ‘who’ you have always been looking for. It…