God Is Not 3 Guys

The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. ( Karma Tube ) . . . hundreds of people in hoodies, heavy coats, and wool blankets braced against the wind. . . . dentists arriving from five states were getting ready to fix the teeth of the first 1,000 people in line. . . . better-off Americans spend over $1 billion each year just to make their teeth a few shades whiter. Millions of others rely on charity clinics and hospital ERs to treat painful and neglected teeth. Unable to afford expensive root canals and crowns, many simply have them pulled. . . . . . . She looked at some of the others who had come here, despite working for a living cutting down trees, building homes, minding a town library, running small businesses. “We are not staying home, not sleeping and living off the government,” she said. She tried not to look at the 51-year-old truck driver lying next to her who’d had three teeth pulled, his mouth stuffed with gauze. . . . [She said] ...

May 9, 2017 Two more priests for the Catholic Church, which laments its shortage of priests, were ordained on Sunday, May 7, in a beautifully uplifting ceremony ( more about this next time ). Rosemarie Henzler and Maria Annoni would be happy to relieve the severe shortage of priests, but bullheaded, stubborn sexism will not allow it. Some prominent Catholic women do not support ordination for women because they think it endorses clericalism. Sandra Schneiders is one, as the previous post indicates. When she spoke at Newman Center in St. Cloud, she made fun of women being ordained by likening them to goldfish devoured by sharks. But the notion that ordained women are subsumed by or unwittingly endorse clericalism was invalidated on Sunday by newly-ordained Rose Henzler. She kindly granted me permission to publish her tribute to her mother. My mother modeled for me how to persist against injustice in all forms but especially in my church—how to speak truth to power. As she w...

A provocative series is airing on PBS: “Bible’s Buried Secrets.” The most subversive segment, “Did God have a wife?” (video) captured the most attention from me. I wondered whether it would spill intoxicating information I have garnered over years of doing feminist research.     “Did God have a wife?” did not seem feminist to me during most of the hour, although its female scholar, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, reaches for provocation. Her main point is that common perceptions about the Bible and God as taught by the Judaeo/Christian tradition are upended by archaeological finds. They show that Hebrew ancestors of the Jews did not practice monotheism. Jews also did not invent monotheism, but that point was less clear in the documentary. For hundreds of thousands of years, what is called God was a woman. She had many different names, but She was not rivaled by males. They were her consorts, not her superiors. The Great Mother gave life, and what we would call...

December 30, 2016   New Year hope despite chaos Since the election I have been veering back and forth between fighting despair and being the one to console others near despair. I counted ten Trump appointments of persons apparently committed to destroying the departments they should manage. They threaten justice, labor, money policies, environment, education, energy, commerce, housing, and health care. We are on the cusp of change coming from chaos. I fear the center cannot hold. William Butler Yeats, a poet of yesteryear, has a poem for our time: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Looking for hope, I had a talk with a mentor/friend of mine who would hesitate to call...

As a writer about religions and spirituality, I have tried to avoid writing about politics, but right now I cannot get politics out of my mind. And when events become as momentous as those occurring today, politics merge with spirituality. A man whose foremost talent is selling himself, who aspires less to lead the country than to glorify himself, was elevated to the most influential political office in the world. As an American facing the world, I am embarrassed. I admit I rejoice that Trump’s approval rating is tanking. Maybe, I hope, maybe, maybe his supporters are beginning to discern the truth …………. At this point in my writing I started guessing which developments since the election might have opened the eyes of formerly deluded voters, but that’s a futile exercise. The signs pointing to Trump’s true character were quite evident before the election. As I go through my days, I console myself and fellow mourners with the astonishing image of the rising sun. A mentor/friend of m...

Parker Palmer offers a song   that can appeal to both religious and non-religious people. Scroll down to the lyrics of Sara Thomsen with the guitar.    I cried when watching this next video.  A young Arab-American sets himself up across the street from a Trump Tower, blindfolded with a sign saying that he trusts passersby, inviting them to give him a hug.   Nothing happens for a while, and then . . . I ended my reflection on nones by asking, “Why [in our increasingly secular culture] does our entire culture embrace the religious feast of Christmas?” Don’t we all love newscasts of people being exceptionally generous during this season? Don't we love stories of spreading love and cheer?  I do. I think we all need these stories even more because of growing secularism with its despicable focus on buying stuff to stuff people who already are stuffed with stuff. Spiritual values during the Christmas season provide relief from mandatory gift-g...

November 14, 2016 The number of religiously non-affiliated people, according to the Pew Research Center, is rising. In 2007 they comprised 16 percent of Americans. In 2015 their percentage rose to 23 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Christians fell from 78 to 71 percent. I do not mourn this, although I regularly attend Mass with Catholic religious sisters. Not all these nuns are so very different from nones. Both groups have spiritual values that transcend conventional bounds, but nuns express their spirituality in religious terms while nones express spirituality without religion. At the same time that I feel at home with nuns, I identify with nones’ getting more inspiration from nature than from God-talk. Like nones, I have lost respect for institutional religion. My biggest criticism of Christianity is its God-images turned into gods by patriarchal language imposed on churches by the Vatican. I hold it responsible for Pope Francis' lack of vision regarding women. I...