Published on Substack October 30, 2023 The plane descended and I looked out over low mountains, the tree canopy bright with autumn and the rivers and lakes disclosing themselves to my vantage point in a way that seemed almost intimate, as their shapes can’t be fully perceived from a shore or bank. I was traveling … Continue reading A Visit to Berkeley Divinity School
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Revolutionary Patience
Published on Substack on October 23, 2023 The terror and anger of the last two weeks might make us want to turtle up and hide away. Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israel and the indifference to civilian death in Israel’s military response creates such overwhelming moral confusion in me that it’s hard to look at … Continue reading Revolutionary Patience
Two Early Encounters with the Divine
Published on Substack on June 1, 2023 I have a story I tell about my own spiritual awakening. I was seventeen, and on a family vacation. We had driven from Wisconsin across the southwest, and all during the trip I had been moved by profound natural beauty. After a stop in Los Angeles, we drove … Continue reading Two Early Encounters with the Divine
A Priest at the End of Christendom
Published May 22, 2023 on Substack “I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to reform the church. I just need to love people.” This is what I said when interviewing for my current position as the rector of a small, urban Episcopal church in the midwest. Eight years before I had begun working for … Continue reading A Priest at the End of Christendom
Saint Peter Returns to the Garden
Unless a Grain of Wheat, India ink and pastel on paper St. Peter Returns to the Garden by KPB Stevens God of calloused hands, like splinters, like wooden bowls full of dinner, I returned here with morning, wanting to return to that last evening we spent together, all of us in a shadowed room, our … Continue reading Saint Peter Returns to the Garden
