Following Jesus in rejecting empire
I’ve been startled lots of times (I have a hair-trigger startle reflex). I’ve been scared on a number of occasions. But I’ve only really experienced panic twice. Knowing people who have panic attacks regularly I feel quite lucky. Panic is different from fear. The human instinct when fear arrives is for “fight or flight,” and…
“The poor you will always have with you…” (Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7). As someone who holds deep convictions about God’s call to love and serve those excluded by our economic systems, I’ve thought a good bit about these words of Jesus spoken during Holy Week. They were provoked when a woman broke open an…
I consider myself a patient man. It comes naturally to me. I think I must be hard wired for patience. I remember one day as a child of about seven-years-old. Mom was talking to a neighbor in our backyard and I was standing next to her. “Mom?” I asked. “Just wait a minute, Scotty, I’m…
On September 10, 1972 I celebrated my 9th birthday aboard Her Majesty’s Ship the Canberra. It was the second largest passenger ship in the world at the time, next to the Queen Mary. My small town, Iowa family set sail the day before from San Francisco Bay, bound for Sydney, Australia. It was one of…
I am not interested in writing about the fall of empires. Empires, like all things in the physical world, suffer a constant state of decay. It is the tinnitus of the universe, that high-pitched ringing of the second law of thermodynamics. The sound of everything moving from a state of order to a state of…