(Un)Fair and (Im)Balanced

It’s nice to be able to talk publicly about this after several months. My wife, Amy, has been called to serve as the new senior minister of First Christian Church in Portland, Oregon. I’ll be on staff part-time as well, heading up growth and development. My title is still a work in progress, but basically,…

It seems lately that the Republican party is painting itself into an angry corner that it can’t find its way out of. Rush Limbaugh’s recent loose-lipped “slut” comment is a clarion call to his significant conservative base to forge ahead in a direction that leads nowhere good. Basically, he cast negative, sexually charged aspersions at…

Sometimes political candidates get wrongly labeled as a theocrat (one whose policy decisions are directly influenced by divine guidance) simply because they’re conservative. So when I heard the “T” word being batted around with regard to Rick Santorum, I hedged. Until this past weekend, that is. As the old saying, wrongly attributed quite often to…

Everyone who calls me to speak somewhere, it seems, wants me to address the issue of declining church membership, and particularly how to connect with younger adults. The problem is that sometimes the invitation is built on a false premise. It’s the hope of many churches that if they can find a way to connect…

The four Gospels in the Bible are central to the Christian faith. But they don’t always agree on the facts. So which is right? Which is most important? And does it even matter if certain stories are told differently from Gospel to Gospel? Some who feel the need to interpret the Bible literally have to…

Four weeks from now, on April 1st, Chalice Press will release my first memoir, titled PregMANcy: A Dad, a Little Dude and a Due Date. I wrote it back when Amy was pregnant with our second child, Zoe. As you can tell from the chapter below, it took a while for me to warm to…

Travis Mamone follows up his first video on “Shit Emergent Christians Say” with a sequel.

I got emails from my mom and uncle about Nana, my last living grandparent. The news isn’t great. She’s struggled with dementia for some years now and hasn’t recognized me the last several times I’ve seen her. But while her mind has been betraying her for a while, it’s her health now that seems to…

My son, Mattias, was in a religious school in town for a while for preschool. We knew going in that their beliefs did not align in a lot of ways with ours, but there are limited options in a town the size of Pueblo. I’ll admit it was pretty funny the day we got a…

The bad church signs were quite a hit last week, so I thought I’d share some more of my favorites. And if you didn’t see the first batch of bad signs, check them out here. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Anyone who can guess what part of the…

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