Following Jesus in rejecting empire
Some thoughts about each of the podcast interviews
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…
Years ago, I was in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, a very troubled corner of North America with some of the highest rates of homelessness and intravenous drug use. I was hanging out with an intentional community that had located themselves in this neighborhood as agents of grace and beauty and change. One night, I…
The world just got a whole lot smaller. Whether you live in Milan, Italy or Moline, Illinois; York, England or New York, New York; Johannesburg, California or Johannesburg, South Africa, we are all now sheltering in place and watching a pandemic sweep the globe. I don’t want to minimize the disparities here. One look at…