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'faith' Tagged Posts

The Power of Symbols

Happy All Saints Day! I  love the “dancing saints” at St. Gregory of Nissa Church in San Francisco.  Completed in 2009, this wonderful 3,000 square foot painting depicts a staggering variety of traditional and surprising saints depicted in a style that recalls ancient iconography and yet all of them are dancing.  The artist,  Mark Dukes, collaborated with the congregation to select and…

Just-Us Church

One of the most telling differences among individual American churches lies in their approach to the world beyond their doors. In my mind there are two major camps:  the “just-us” churches and the “justice” churches. For some congregations, the “just-us” sort,  interactions with the wider community are strictly limited to their evangelism efforts.  In such churches, members are encouraged to invite their…

Silence Still Equals Death

In honor of National Coming Out Day (NCOD), here’s a portion of a chapter from my doctoral thesis, Bringing the Refugees Home: Faith Formation for the Dechurched.  This chapter chronicles some of my own history with HIV/AIDS and my participation in creating the very first National Coming Out Day back in 1988.  For my friends who do not identify as LGBTQQI or…

Preaching What You Practice

If  you have read any of the posts on my personal blog, you will at once notice that I have written a number of posts on practice. Spiritual practice, musical practice, ethical practice, best practice:  practice, practice, practice!  It certainly seems obvious that a longtime musician is committed to practice, but there is a deeper historical and theological component to my fascination…