Volume 15, Issue 3

Thanks and Giving

Cover Stories

Give It and Get It. Got It?
By Rev. Candace Chellew
We cannot gain the peace, love, mercy, and goodness we crave unless we first give it away — and give it out of the abundance of our thankfulness. God has endowed the LGBT community with an endless supply of these gifts.

Teaching Thanks
By Lori Heine
Thanksgiving is perhaps best understood as a celebration of who God is. That God blesses us with more wonderful gifts than we can even comprehend not because of who we are, but because of who God is.

Give Thanks for the Trials
By Ash
God gets us in a place ready to receive his/her love not in spite of our pains but through them. Our moments of loneliness, persecution and inner torment are when God is knocking on our hearts waiting to be let loose to work.

The Gift of Thanks
By Rev. Suzie Chamness
If we seek God, we will be given the things that we need.

Thank God
By John H. Campbell
It is one thing to merely state the phrase, “Thank God!” It is another to fully embrace the meaning and motivation behind those two words and fully comprehend and truly learn to feel it.

Features

The Media, Suicide and Homophobia
By Warren J. Blumenfeld
Why then do the media not continually cover these incidents? If they did, our nation would not need a “wake up call.” We as a society might remain awake and vigilant.

Terrorists of the Mind: The Pope and Other Homophobic Clergy
By Rev. Dr. Jerry S. Maneker
I’m sure you can imagine how it must feel to be a Gay person and have the self-defined “vicar of Christ” tell one and all that you are disordered!

Doin’ Time in Gay Man’s Hell
By Don Charles Hampton
We must free ourselves of shame and the desire to do shameful things. The term “Gay Pride” has a spiritual as well as a sexual meaning, and the sooner we realize it, the better.

Christianity Going South
By Martin E. Marty
The homophobia that leads nations like Uganda and Kenya to debate whether to condemn homosexuals to death is richly related not only to old tribal taboos, but to new-style Pentecostal churches there.

A Church for the 21st Century
By Rev. Dr. Jerry S. Maneker
We may well be at the crossroads that ushers in a New Reformation of the Church that is no less healthy than the Reformation in the sixteenth century for which such luminaries as Martin Luther and John Calvin were the catalysts, and of which God was the Architect.

Why Obama Became the Religious Right Wing’s Devil
By Dr. Robert N. Minor
Obama became the black face of all that was evil. Reid and Polosi were there too, but the demonic had manifest itself in Obama’s stimulus and “Obamacare.”

It’s Time to Get Serious in This Civil Rights Struggle
By Rev. Dr. Jerry S. Maneker
By using hateful words as self-identifiers merely shows the hearer of those words what one truly thinks of him/herself!

From the Pulpit

The “Oh, Yeah” …Of Remembering
By Rev. Candace Chellew
Every day is a dance of remembering and forgetting, of forgetting and remembering. It’s a dance we should love and never resent, because unless we forget, we cannot remember.

The Seven Deadlies: Acedia
By Rev. Candace Chellew
In our acedia — in our overwhelming sloth — we begin to not care about others, and in that general state of not caring, we begin to care only about ourselves and what is good for us. We do it individually, and we do it as a society.

The Seven Deadlies: Lust
By Rev. Candace Chellew
Each of us is stranded in a world of dangerous lust that constantly seeks to seduce us — to convince us to give up our real freedom for the false freedoms of money, or power, or beauty. We must build our houses here — we must multiply here — and testify to the real freedom of gratitude and trust in the Holy.

The Seven Deadlies: Anger
By Rev. Candace Chellew
When we engage in healthy anger — we say to one another, “here is my love and anger.” We’re willing to lift each other up — to share with each other our gods — what we worship — and to share our scars — what has done us harm in our lives. When we engage in healthy anger, we are vulnerable to one another — open to give and to receive.

Holy Humor

An Act of God

The Young Doctor