Today, we are charged to remember. To know that as we live together in community, we are also in community with the silently singing lives in the vast congregation of the earth as well... Let us remember, and then act.

All organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water... In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world.

You are loved beyond your wildest imaginings by the spirit of creation.

The only way we survive this modern agony is together.

In her 1975 theological treatise Suffering, German liberation theologian Dorothee Söelle* examines the ways that suffering can knit humans beings closer together, and can draw us more fully into the process of loving. She uses the term apatheia, “the inability to suffer,” to describe the...

In our water ritual, we bring water from the places we live or the places we may have visited and pour it in one container. All of the water mixes together, and every drop has some of the molecules of water from every place....

Hallelujah! is a dangerous word, especially in the mouths of the creatively maladjusted.* Hallelujah! is a dangerous word, for it comes always with an exclamation point. Hallelujah!...

Our communities of memory and promise are founded upon covenants because we all need a defense against the impulse of immediate feelings that challenge our best intentions. It is necessary to be reminded from time to time of what you said you were going to do, and what you really want, over and...

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should or because...

You’ve seen it. Two black men pass each other on the street. They nod. Subtle, sometimes imperceptible, but there is acknowledgement. “Do you know him?” “No . . . (yes) . . . no.” I learned this from my father and my grandfather and my other grandfather and my uncles and my great uncle and...