I invite younger readers to take a look [at my book, Building a Protestant Left] and see if there is anything there for them. Few of the issues that C&C addressed have gone away. Nor have people in left Christian traditions disappeared. (Yes, they are a minority, but we often underestimate how much that has always been true). We can learn from their experience in the current moment.

Quite a few of the pieces I've been half-finishing lately are about the mixed blessings of left-wing discourse on so-called Christian Nationalism, and/or the traumas of ICE invading my old home ground of Minneapolis and shooting protestors in cold blood, and/or something we learned in the last election: that Trump won because about half of the populace thought he was a lesser evil compared to left-liberals.....I hope to circle back through some of these issues over the next f

It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases.

Hardwired into religious traditions, as part of longstanding sensibilities, are teachings about justice, care for the weak, and attention to the common good: teachings that command nontrivial respect in the public sphere.... Common sense plus the moral legacies of our religious traditions add up to a combined weight that is not trivial. We may not be able to fight a riptide, but if we can fund a war, then surely we can fund a school.

What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health care as an issue in US politics. But primarily it is episode 10,255 in my ongoing screed against garbage in garbage out polls and shitty media spin generated from them. My longstanding dissatisfaction with polling about US religion (for example here) led me to this place—triggering and informing what I will say—but that aspect of the proble

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories that make me feel better about myself. Recently there was one about “Dad bods”—a term for bodies that are reasonably fit but not fully optimal in the way of body fat percentages, six-pack abs, and a lack of any evidence of drinking a beer now and then. My own Dad bod has decent aerobic and core strength for my age, but it definitely only

(Part of a thread to share poems or poetry-adjacent writing, as discussed here .) We cannot say how this cascading wreck of complacent...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...

While talking with my friend Ron as he drove through Nebraska, I quoted him a James McMurtry song: “Out here in the middle where the...

This is to share and make a smallish comment about a jaw-dropping image that I've just seen, fresh in my newsfeed from Nation magazine....

Reading my news feed today, two things somewhat related to this and this recent posts struck me as worth noting. There is now...

Counting my home in East Tennessee and a small summer cabin in Wisconsin in an old pasture where my Mom grew up, I have four Senators and...

Little by little, I have come to a realization that (as someone I read on youtube articulated it) “Holy shit, I think I’m a Miley Cyrus...

Recently I asked my dentist—with whom I have chatted about teeth and sports for years—how long he thought it would take his office to get...

This post is cross-published here on Narrative Paths Journal I fielded a query from a University of Tennessee campus newspaper about...

I went to my local farmer’s market here in the north woods of Wisconsin, feeling happy for the beautiful day and the chance to be support...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five. Here is a picture. I have limited memories from these years, and most of these are filtered through home movies that I watched later or stories my father told me about his first job there as a Lutheran minister. But I have a strong impression that the town, named Williams, was intact and reasonably thriving—not unlike a nearby town named Kanawha wh

Without strong Democratic leadership, without mass protest, and with the economy so disrupted that I become confused as to how strikes...

I don’t often recirculate comments from others here, but sometimes I make an exception, and I'm doing do so for this interview with Noam...

Imagine that a shark has a fish literally inside its jaws, but cannot bite down. Prayer is like that. It is like a “toxin” that makes you...