At Sea with Justin McRoberts

Reinvention is one of the hallmarks of a long-term career as an artist. The ability and the desire, the capacity to take something that used to work a certain way during a certain season and do something new, something different with that same material with that same pattern with those same skills.  One of the things I've admired about Christa Wells, in her career is her ability and her capacity t...

In the introduction to last week’s episode, I mentioned that in the years I spent as a pastor in an evangelical setting, the conversation about the place of LGBTQ folks in a local church was a regular and often difficult one.  That the Biblical image I kept coming back to was of Moses and his people stuck between the uncrossable waters in front of them and the violent forces behind them.   The ten...

During my time as a pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church, I was in an ongoing conversation about the relationship between LGBTQ folks and local churches. And over the years, regardless of all the different kinds of settings in which that conversation was happening, it kept bringing me back to this very particular biblical imagery.  Moses and his people were on the edge of a body of water that...

Hello, and welcome to episode 100 of the @Sea podcast.  We launched this thing on April 30th, 2016. And 100 episodes later, here we are. I want to pause right here at Episode 100; you do a couple of things, two things very specifically. The first one is simply to say thank you, thank you for listening for paying attention, I do not take for granted at all, not for a moment, that you offer your att...

A few years ago, I was invited to participate in this event. I don't remember what the event was, as a speaker, I was there to story tell, tell some stories and teach. And when the organizer introduced me, he said singer, songwriter, musician, Justin McRoberts. And I remember like, I wasn't mad, but I remember feeling like misnamed, or, like, I wasn't even offended, but like, it just didn't feel r...

Whether you are a kid or you have kids, or you like kids, or you were a kid, or whatever, I think you're gonna like this project and the songs on it and you can pick it up from us directly at www.thedudeandthebird.bandcamp.com or beginning February 22, you can listen to it and all your favorite streaming services. Check it out. Links For Justin: Read Justin's Substack Order In The Low - NEW Book w...

Oh, the enneagram.  It is, like many tools, so often misused or misapplied.  It feels to me that a lot of folks are stuck between some form of infatuation with the tools or their type and some form of annoying disdain with the whole thing. I’m not a fan of the enneagram. Not the way people are fans of the Boston Red Sox or Manchester United. I like what I see happen in the lives of people who  Jim...

Sometimes what looks like compromise is not compromise at all. Sometimes it’s the hard choice to be a constant and a light in a shady and unstable environment.  And sometimes it means being the one willing to be humbled and be wrong and change and grow in a stuck and calcified culture.  I remember, after a few years working within a religious institution and experiencing the disillusionment that o...

Just as there are artists who work at the edges of a culture, pushing boundaries and breaking rules that need breaking, there are also artists doing essential work closer to the heart or center of a their chosen culture.  For two decades, Mike Donehey has taken the sacred trust of folks at the heart of his culture and led, lovingly and faithfully.  Mike and I click well, so my conversation with hi...

Because I came into the practice of faith through a distinctly protestant doorway, I didn’t know, early on, what to make of the Catholic of veneration or even emphasis on Mary, the mother of Jesus. The way I’d heard the story told, Mary was almost a bystander to her own pregnancy; a tertiary figure watching the Spirit of God and a few angels conspire to bring Good News to the planet.  Of course, l...

In recent years, I have noticed a kind of uptick in conversations and the pace of conversations and the intensity of conversations about mental health come the holidays. Some of that has to do with maybe the shorter days, some of that has to do with being around people who might be triggering, or just some difficult family dynamics, the pressure of spending a whole lot of money or not spending mon...

Near the heart of the Christmas / Advent Story is the expectation that God is going to offer a gift. The head-fake in this Bible story is that, when those waiting come upon and/or are given that gift, it’s just a baby. And I know folks have surrounded Jesus’ birth with all kinds of magic imagery, sparkles, and theme music since then. But for people who had been waiting for some kind of momentous,...

During the first season of the podcast, I got to talk with Dominique Dubois Gillard about his book “Rethinking Incarceration.” One of the things we talked about was the difficulty and opportunity to steer the ship, even slightly, in institutional spaces already (and often blindly) dominated by whiteness and privilege.  His most recent book dives directly into that very conversation. Subversive Wit...

This will take on a bit of a confessional tone.  A few years ago, Dr. Christena Cleveland talked on my podcast about the need for black leaders to steer away from trying to influence white spaces so often. The effort, she clarified, to change white minds about whiteness, should be executed by white hands. Not because of a hatred or distain among black leaders for the people in white-centered cultu...

“If you really wanted to help, you’d up and move to Africa.” It was a few minutes after I’d just spoken at a college chapel and a particularly fired-up student was trying to convince his classmates to resist child sponsorship in favor of a more radical and, in his mind, more holistic response to the problem of extreme poverty.  His suggestion that a serious person would uproot their entire lives i...

“Sometimes, God gives us glimpses into the enormity of the work at hand, not to increase our capacity to do a larger work or more work but so that the work we can do becomes more vital and less optional. We are compelled to do the work we can do because we cannot do all we want.” I wrote that on the way home from a 10 day trip to India with Compassion international. It was, to be entirely honest,...

It was somewhere in the early 2000s when I got a package in the mail from a friend, who had just taken a job with an organization that purported to rescue people from slavery. And I've got to admit, and especially at the time, it was something of an embarrassing admission that I had no idea that that was a need. It blew my mind. There are people in slavery, there are still people in slavery. And i...

I ran into a friend recently whom I haven’t seen in a while. And at first, I didn’t recognize him. Some of that had to do with the time between meetings. But more of it had to do with context. The last time I saw him was in California in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This recent meeting was in a town called Goshen, Virginia. He and I were walking into buildings adjacent to one another and caught ea...

In the book Prayer: 40 Days of Practice, I take a swing at unpacking the word “spiritual;” not an effort to redefine the word for all users, but an effort to expand its application to meet my own experience and expectation.  I do so by way of a kind of allegory; one in which a young man visits a religious guide of some kind, I think I call him a priest in the actual chapter, and shares that someth...

A few weeks ago, I was in a contraption with a few folks my age and older who were voicing concerns about all the “information” kids get online. During that conversation, statistics were thrown around about how much data we’re subject to. Apparently, every person creates something like 1.7 MB of data every second, which amounted to 2.5 quintillion data bytes per day.  That Is A  Lot  At some point...

When I am asked what I do, I often say that I try to prove language for the process of faith and art. I think that does a decent job of describing my work, even if it’s a bit nebulous.  Thing is, language shapes and defines cultures; the difference between one culture and another is often a matter of difference between the words we’re using for the same things.. or even the same experiences.  This...

It’s likely you’ve heard something like  “You’re being emotional.”  Or “let’s not bring emotions into this.”  And it’s likely that, when you heard it, it was said in the context of the conversation is about something very, very serious; something serious enough that, were we to “get emotional” or “bring emotions into it” we would complicate it and muddy it.  That has been my training (cultural and...

I’ve come to pretty fundamentally believe that some things cannot (and should not) be discussed outside of personal experience. That might sound odd coming from someone with a relatively traditional education in western philosophy. But… here I am.  One of the keenest examples of that is gun violence. The way I see it:  despite the numbers,  despite the mathematics, everything stops with the phrase...

Sometimes, there aren’t sufficient words for a moment or a season or a feeling. The other side to that coin is that sometimes the wild, the unexpected, or inexplicable … serve the blessed purpose of breaking the words we are used to using and inviting us to make something new from their pieces.  This is one way to talk about poetry.  I think of the way the Scriptures of my own religious tradition...

I have mentioned Caroline McIntyre‘s book “caring for words in a culture of lies“ many times over the course of this podcast’s five years. It was, upon first read, a formative and grounding resource; it continues to be.  In part because I have historically had a tendency to talk too much, putting too many words on the table and muddying the connection that better words, more thoughtful words, migh...