Back in the old tent-meeting days, they used to sing a sweet little hymn called “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” They probably still sing it in Bible schools. It seems a good way to motivate shiny-eyed children to live for Jesus without having to
This is a strange story. Both those in my long-ago and faraway “straight” life and those in my world today will surely think so. It is a love story. And it recounts the experience that, perhaps more than any other, showed me who I really
A few years ago in downtown Phoenix, the old-building-saving artsy crowd treated the local yokels to a spectacle, the like of which few had ever seen. While music played, our attention was drawn to several cannons. These were of the sort that used to fire
In my city and perhaps most others, there are many churches that have no official policy of being welcoming to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people. The general assumption, in the GLBT community, is that if we’re not issued an “official” welcome, that means that
It has been almost 10 years since I came out. Listening to many of my GLBT Christian friends agonize over how to talk to the straights in their lives about their sexuality, I realize that most of them go about it in the same ineffective
At lunch the other day, I struggled through yet another challenging conversation with my good friend, the Church Lady. She doesn’t really look like Dana Carvey, and I’m sure she wouldn’t appreciate being satirized on Saturday Night Live. But she knows I’m writing this essay
I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony… In an article in The New York Times, my cousin’s enterprising husband, professor-turned-farmer Jerry Ford, described garlic as “the Grateful Dead of Vegetables.” And indeed, their first annual Minnesota Garlic Festival was something like
As I begin this essay, on the evening of Mother’s Day, I have a very pertinent question: “Is Momma in the house?” The American Right is now in the process of imploding upon itself. How can we know, for certain, that it is about to
(Jesus) looked at them and said, “What then does this text mean: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When the
There is a real tendency, in some modern religious circles, to discount the existence of miracles. They don’t happen every day, we are told, therefore they can never happen. Some people say this ignores the logic behind a belief in miracles. That if they happened