Posts Categorized: Community Organizing

Healing the Wounds of Transphobia

“Do we heal?” asks theologian, Dr. Wendy Farley. In the religious & legal attacks on our trans siblings, we experience a communal wounding — an indulgence in hatred and contempt no one can evade. Read more »

God’s Gifts Used as Weapons of War in Palestine

Last month I joined the ‘Mourning Choir’ in my hometown of Louisville despite being a mediocre singer at best. The Choir formed after the October 7 Hamas attack, the loss of 1,139 Iraeli lives, and the continuing loss of more than 25,000 Palestinians. This crisis period has brought Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others into community… Read more »

Step By Step: Faithfully Seeking Climate Justice

Rising up for climate justice  Presbyterians share their thoughts from a recent climate march     On September 8, tens of thousands of people gathered in marches around the world to walk with creation and for climate justice with Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice.  Here are the stories of three Presbyterians who joined this movement.  Marching… Read more »

The Church for Today

Snail mail still works Thinking through technology’s uses by Richard Hong     My first job was in software development, creating the first-generation of programs that replaced laboratory notebooks with computer systems. Our clients expected that computerization would solve their problems. But we had a saying: “The computer doesn’t do it better, it just does… Read more »

The B-Flat Christian

And the Walls Came a Tumblin’ Down What ‘walls’ do we need God to tear down in our lives?  by Rebecca Lister  And the walls came a tumblin’ down. These words came to me the other morning as I was listening to an interview by the author of a book entitled The Line Becomes a… Read more »

The Church for Today

Going backwards How church entryways have changed   by Richard Hong    In March 2016, our historic sanctuary was destroyed in a three-alarm fire. After five months of worshiping in “portable” locations, we returned to our gym, which we outfitted for use as a worship space until our sanctuary can be rebuilt. Last month we took… Read more »

Barn Boots and Blessings

Finding God in the Junk Drawer A much-needed reminder to ‘watch for God’ by Donna Frischknecht Jackson    God spoke to me the other day. I wasn’t standing on some mountaintop. Nor was I lying prostrate on the floor. I wasn’t even kneeling in the quiet of the old sanctuary of the little rural church… Read more »

Writing from the Margins

Civility or Resistance? Practicing Jesus-centered justice By Antonio (Tony) Aja After the shooting of Republican Congress members by a mentally ill person on a baseball field, many of the opposite side of my political and theological worldview started to say that we need to be ‘’civil,’’ stop naming others with pejorative epithets and lower the… Read more »

Writing from the margins

Lectionary passages and local politics Writing with a not-so-colonized mind By Antonio “Tony” Aja Theologian Karl Barth is quoted as saying that preachers need to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Of course, the reason is that we need to be attentive to what is happening in our communities and… Read more »

A mote in Minerva’s eye

The tapestry: My anti-racism story Seeing a gap in the way racial issues are categorized by Anita Coleman My eyes opened to another perfect California day. The usual cool, foggy marine layer that coastal California tends to get in June was missing but my day soon turned cloudy anyway. That was the morning, Thursday June… Read more »