There was an elderly man in England named Arthur Flowerdew. He’d lived his whole life in the seaside town of Norfolk, and had left England only once, to journey to the French coast. All his life, however, Arthur Flowerdew had been plagued by vivid mental pictures of a great city surrounded by...

The gospels are full of stories about Jesus healing. The healing stories represent some of the most moving images in Scripture. They are the most important miracle stories that were used to convince the world that Jesus was the Son of God during the first five centuries of the Common Era....

Happiness is a deep, persistent and universal obsession for humanity. As one of my correspondents asked, "Why isn’t happiness the only thing that matters?" From the very beginning Americans (in particular) have made happiness a central piece of their national quest....

Take a moment right now to visualize in your mind’s eye the first American Thanksgiving feast which our Pilgrim forebears shared with their Native American neighbors on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the Fall of 1621. If you’re like me, you imagined a pretty pleasant and peaceable scene—a...

At one point in her novel Fly Away Home, American writer Marge Piercy has a mother say of her daughters: “The girls had been raised Unitarian (Universalist), which seemed a nice, sensible compromise between having no religion at all and having to lie about what we believed. Enough religion to be...

"It was still dark that morning in 1942 when the Gestapo rousted from bed the Jews of Bobawa, a Polish village. In the confusion, twelve-year-old Samuel Oliner slipped away and hid on a roof, still in his pajamas. The next afternoon, when he dared to look around, the ghetto was silent....

This morning, I want us to grapple with one of the most universal and troubling facts of human existence. Though every last one of us would have it otherwise, it is an unavoidable reality that during our lifetimes people close to us will become sick, suffer great pain, and, in some cases, die. It...

Elie Wiesel was just a wide-eyed and innocent adolescent when he and all the other Jews of the Transylvanian village of Sighet were jammed into cattle cars one April night in 1944 by SS troops, and shipped to Auschwitz....

An Austrian millionaire was in the news this month for giving away all of his fortune. Why? "For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said....

...[H]ow we eat is not an isolated issue. While we would like to think, and often do think, with our independent human personalities, that what we eat is our own business, the truth is that what I eat, what you eat, has further reaching consequences than merely staying alive and being healthy. In...

A meat eater comes up to a vegan: “Did you hear about the new study saying vegans are more likely to go blind? I guess it’s because you don’t get the proper nutrition.” The vegan replied, “Nah, it’s just from reading all of those tiny ingredient lists.” Vegans (vegetarians who don’t...

Working to feed the hungry and obtain adequate food for poor people in our society has long been central to my own justice and service work. When I was in high school, I spent many weekends volunteering with a group called Youth Service Opportunities Project....

...Our spiritual connection to the food we eat has...been harmed by a modern culture in which over-processed foods are so ubiquitous that we have ceased to think about foods in their whole forms any more. ...Michael Pollan writes, “Try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother...

There I was, at the "Big Question:" What is my relationship to the creatures on this earth, and to the earth itself? Are they, is it, here for me, or am I a part of it? How far does the interdependent web extend, and do I really believe that all of us are intimately connected with all of existence?

...For the affluent, sitting down to a dinner derived from perhaps twenty-five different food sources is taken for granted...Filling the plate and eating and drinking to fullness is a social event, an opportunity to admire the art before you, to pay your respects by consuming it....

What you choose to eat is important to both parts of how you live out the mission of our congregation—transforming your life and caring for the earth. ...How many of you have heard that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away?” Apples (and other fresh fruits) are healthy foods, and eating them...

Moses was a rancher. Long before he became a famous Biblical patriarch who led his people to freedom from slavery, he was a simple rancher. And this simple rancher was tending his flock on the side of a mountain one day circa 1527 BCE, when he came upon a small forest fire—a burning bush. He was...

I want to tell you right up-front that I am unabashedly pro-life. I am also unashamedly pro-abortion. What I am not is unequivocally running for political office! Now, some of you might consider my reproductive platform to be oxymoronic. The fact is that many of us find ourselves in this place of...

It is 2 a.m. I am sleeping in the chaplain’s on-call room at an inner city hospital. My room hovers over the Emergency Entrance and the darkness is punctuated with sirens and lights. It is my night to be available for those unexpected things that happen in the night. But, unlike most of my calls,...

After I graduated from college, I worked for Planned Parenthood for several years. Most days, I walked through protestors to get to work. They usually carried crosses and said things like, "Jesus will forgive you if you repent for your work." It turned out that the most revolutionary thing I did...