At first glance, Mother’s Day appears a quaint and conservative holiday, a sort of greeting card moment, honoring 1950s values, a historical throw back to old-fashioned notions of hearth and home. Let’s correct that impression by saying:  Happy Radical Mother’s Day.  In May 1907, Anna Jarvis, a member of a Methodist congregation in Grafton, West…

May 6 is the National Day of Prayer.  This year, the news has been full of stories about people being excluded from prayer.  Those excluded include Americans from non-Christian religions, atheists, as well as the Rev. Franklin Graham, a fundamentalist missionary who has consistently criticized Islam.  Although the media acts as if quarreling over prayer…

So, Governor Rick Perry blamed the Gulf oil spill on an “act of God.”  Of course, “act of God” is a phrase used to describe something beyond human control, an unavoidable event.  But isn’t it also the case that the words convey theological meaning as well–implying that the Gulf spill was somehow predestined or ordained…

Today, Christians celebrate the legacy of St. Mark the Evangelist.  Mark is mostly remembered as the traditional author of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel in the New Testament–a breathless story of Jesus as a teller of tales and a miracle-working healer who is crucified by the Romans, and whose identity as “the Son…

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