Midlife Meditation

                           They came to St. Louis hoping to win hearts and minds as liberals always do: through love, prayer, empathy, compassion, witness, dialogue, building relationships, scriptural principles, appealing to the better angels of humanity. And as is almost always the case, they lost to cold-hearted power mongering. Liberals wave the banner of hope; conservatives count votes and bargain away principles to consolidate and preserve power. It's how Donald Trump was elected president, how Mitch McConnell is stacking the Supreme Court, how Benjamin Netanyahu is staying in office, how Brexit passed and is still the law of the land, and on and on. Time and again, conservatives have demonstrated through their actions that principles are a commodity. That's how it was in St. Louis, as United Methodists from around the world gathered to decide, once and for all, if one of the world's...

Dr. Strange combing through possible futures. Avengers: Infinity War  is a movie that is long on action, overstuffed with characters, and is very short on plot. It also has a surprisingly shocking conclusion (less surprising when one remembers this is just the first half of the story it's telling) that has genuinely moving moments. At the heart of this colorful, constantly moving slugfest is a single profound moment, upon which the inevitable redemption of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (coming in 2019) rests: mystical magician Dr. Strange's clairvoyant trance. For less than a minute, his image blurs, he appears to have multiple arms, his head buzzes back and forth like that of Fox Mulder caught in a flying saucer's tractor beam. He comes out of it announcing to his super-teammates that he has just analyzed more than a million possible outcomes to their confrontation with cosmic villain Thanos, and there's only one that saves the countless trillions of souls that ...

United Methodists would rather study than decide. I begin with confession. As I've written before, I was not temperamentally well suited for the ministry. The most successful pastors are extraverts who can work crowded rooms, skillfully making every interaction feel like an intimate one-on-one. There are exceptions to this rule, introverts who teach themselves to be more competent greeters, but really shine during in-depth conversations where their excellent listening abilities make for more profound connections. Personally, I much prefer the latter qualities in a pastor, but I completely understand the draw of the warm, electric, extraverted crowd-pleaser. I'm an introvert. There's no getting around it: I don't do well with meet-and-greet occasions. Interpersonally, I'm at my best when I've got the time and space to talk deeply with just one other person, and during my ministerial career, I made that kind of connection a number of times. T...

1925: the Ku Klux Klan marches on Washington, their faces fully exposed. Brace yourselves, boys and girls. It's going to be a bumpy ride. This week, the Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church affirmed Rev. Frank Schaefer's reinstatement to the ministry. Schaefer had been defrocked for presiding over his son's wedding to another man, reinstated on appeal to a higher church court, then had that appeal appealed by the board that originally defrocked him, putting it in the hands of the denomination's extremely cautious highest court. True to form, the Judicial Council's decision was based entirely on procedure, doing all it could to avoid setting anything resembling a precedent: the Board of Ordained Ministry had used incorrect procedures to punish Schaefer, therefore its original decision was void. There is nothing here to protect him, or any other pastor, the next time a Methodist-minister-blessed gay wedding takes place; in fact, next time there'...

Until recently, the Pacific Northwest lacked cities big enough to support boutique retail outlets. Most municipalities relied on a single store for most of their purchasing needs, and in many of those towns, that store was Fred Meyer. I first encountered a Fred Meyer store when I was in high school, and my family would drive into Corvallis to do our shopping. If we just needed groceries, we'd hit the local IGA or Safeway, but if we needed groceries, clothing, hardware, pharmaceuticals, electronics, toys for the kids, and so on, and wanted it all under the same roof, the place to go was Fred Meyer. At first I loved shopping there, but as I became an adult and my needs became more specialized, I found myself frequently frustrated at the limited selection available at whichever Fred Meyer I was visiting. They simply couldn't afford to stock shoes for my extra-wide feet, records of obscure classical works for my esoteric tastes, or books by even more obscure science fiction auth...

  E pluribus unum: out of many, one. That's our United States of America summed up in three neat Latin words. To the world, we're a single, monolithic entity, the only true superpower left. American culture has conquered the world. McDonalds, Starbucks, Wal-Mart--our corporations are everywhere. American tourists are known for their loud, aggressive friendliness. We don't mean to be rude, but sometimes we just can't help ourselves.   25 years ago, I had the privilege of spending two years serving an English Methodist/United Reformed congregation. It was a "united church," a merger between two Methodist congregations and one from the United Reformed denomination, and as such, it had an ongoing identity crisis. Every time there was a pastoral change, the position had to constitutionally switch between Methodist and United Reformed. My first wife, Brenda, and I came to Trinity Church as a clergy couple with one year of student pastorate experience behind...