Progressive Faith Sermons - Dr. Roger Ray

In many ways, religion resembles a long-running, uncontrolled social experiment on the human condition and social change. And a moment's reflection reminds us that all cultural, including religious, systems, have been used to justify everything from the terrifying to the sublime. Dorothee Solle called this the "double function" of religion: "as apology and legitimation of the status quo and its cu...

How you feel about hope likely depends on your own experiences and circumstances. It's been portrayed as both salvation and delusion, and many things in between. Navigating hope and hopelessness, grief and despair, rest and apathy, action and futility, is something of a craft and an art. It is also why the words don't always fit, because we are often at different places on this messy spectrum of g...

The congress of leaders of world religions, meeting in September, drafted a resolution trying to imagine the ways in which spiritual communities might become part of the solution to the crisis of a world that is literally "tumbling" out of order. With the threat of modern wars, the potential of nuclear disaster, the collapse of the environment, and the growing refugee crisis, the traditional relig...

The holidays call for family reunions for both happy and healthy families as well as families who find these times together to be emotionally difficult. We have a right to be honest about both our family's strengths and weaknesses. We have a right to tell our own stories, even if the story turns out to be horrific. We can all choose to work towards more healthy and more loving family connections a...

Human Rights Watch recently observed that "The US is the only UN member country that has not ratified the international treaty on children's rights. Most people might think this isn't such a big deal because the US is good to children. But it turns out we aren't and our state laws don't help." Today's anniversary of adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is an opportune moment to...

In 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated a row of trees and grieved that they had been cut down. His grief expanded from those trees to the hubris of humanity, elegantly and painfully describing how quickly we alter the living world of which we are a part – often to its (and our own) devastation. Though our worlds are different, his voice remains relevant in a society dominated by the violent acc...

The trend started years before the pandemic, before, even, the traumatic divisions caused by the Trump administration. Sociologists are doing verbal gymnastics trying to explain why making and keeping friends has become so difficult in this era. Maybe it is partisan politics, maybe it is just too much self-revelation on social media, and maybe even it is the break down of the mainstream churches o...

Of course, we would all like to end the partisan bickering in Congress as well as around our own family dinner tables! But at what price? When are we reaching a healthy compromise and when are we just surrendering, giving away our closely held values and beliefs? Peace, without justice, is really just surrender.

In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer, Jesus warns of the dangers of contempt. Yet this hasn't stopped us from finding ways and excuses to label people as contemptible and treat them with contempt, often using that contempt to control and hurt one another. Jesus' story invites us to observe how easily we fall into this trap and get caught. Reflecting in this way, we begin...

Jesus' parable of the persistent widow still hits close to home: a world where those in need are ignored by those in power, where those in power are unjust, and where the marginalized and oppressed must wear themselves out just to be heard. In a world like this, we recognize the struggle: how do we "break the mold" of the normal, everyday ways we are conditioned to accommodate injustice, creating...

We often talk about violence as a last resort, even while our society increasingly relies on violence as the first and most trustworthy solution. But this wholehearted commitment to violence as a solution has come at a steep price – the failure to invest in our personal and social wellbeing. Even if we believe that violence is sometimes necessary, or inevitable, we all benefit from moving as much...

The FCC's Fairness Doctrine that required honesty and full disclosure in TV and radio news was removed thirty-five years ago, making way for the advent of 24 hour news programs and talk radio filled with propaganda, distortion, and entertainment that tries to pass for news. Intentional or not, the profit motive influences the content of news programs, leaving the public uninformed about important...

During the pandemic, we've witnessed a mass exodus of people, especially women, from the workforce, returning and staying home as caregivers to the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled. It's another instance of exposing the USA's lack of infrastructure and policy to support this most basic of social functions. At the same time, caregiving jobs are often among the most labor-intensive and low...

Chapter 16 of the Gospel of Luke contains what has been called one of Jesus' "strangest parables," a tale of a rich man with a clever manager, who wiggles his way out of economic and social ruin. Rather than speeding by the economic aspects of this story, we can use it as an opportunity to both better understand how debt and economic justice often go hand in hand (then and now) and better act to c...

On this 21st anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks, we pause to consider the story of one detainee from our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Mansoor Adayfi. He was just a teenager, a Yemeni far from home in the wrong place at the wrong time and was sold by Afghanis to the American soldiers who were looking for al Qaeda terrorists. Mansoor was innocent but he was none-the-less held prisoner and tortured...

Labor Day is a compromise holiday in America because we didn't want to honor labor on the first day of May, May Day, as it is observed all over the rest of the world. May Day, some of our early 20th century presidents and capitalists believed, was too closely associated with Communism and Socialism and we never wanted to be a part of that. America wants to honor laborers, they just never really wa...

Black churches have traditionally talked about civil rights and organized voter events like Sunday voting bus trips called "Souls to the Polls." But do predominantly white churches talk about voters' rights? Now that many states are eliminating polling places in minority neighborhoods, ending Sunday early voting, discouraging mail-in voting, and adding onerous ID requirements to vote, shouldn't al...

While we have watched news reports about Brittany Griner's trial in Russia with shock and horror, similarly insane court proceedings have taken place in our own country. The Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v Wade came at the same time of another decision that would have commanded public attention if it had not been for the furor over the abortion case. Early in May, in a decision writt...

The world is witness that gun violence does not have to be the norm. But until the United States is willing to reckon with the deep structure and enduring legacy of our own gun culture, we will not escape it. Gratefully, for all of us who long for healing, and the peace that comes from belonging to a place without the constant threat of violence and death, we have a way forward.

In 2013, an Italian programmer named Alberto Brandolini observed that - "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it." It became known as Brandolini's law, although it is an astute observation rather than a scientific conclusion. Unfortunately, we've had nearly a decade to observe just how often this is true, with the flowering of con...

Philosophy and Religion departments in universities, once considered to be the "queen" of a college campus, are now being relegated to subheadings in either History or Anthropology departments, treated more like a scourge than a source of wisdom and guidance. The failings of organized religion cannot be denied but maybe we are being a bit hasty about this transformation. There is, after all, more...

Many of us like to say that we are "spiritual but not religious," but what does that mean? As church attendance of all sorts is in steep decline, what exactly are we turning away from and what, if anything at all, are we turning to? Is there a way to hold onto spirituality and still try to remain in community of some sort?

All over Europe there are memorial stones set in streets where the victims of the Holocaust once lived. These scattered memorials serve as reminders of the moral failure of the Nazis and their many sympathizers. In the USA, we have been more inclined to memorialize Confederate military leaders than to acknowledge the evils of slavery they sought to protect. The resistance to teaching a factual Ame...

We are all connected to one another. We may not insist that our neighbors to the south use child labor to produce our fruits and vegetables in our grocery stores but, if they don't keep the prices down, we won't buy them. Our casual daily choices in which we are legally simply exercising our rights, has an impact on others that we often do not see. Still, our choices to do legal things, like buyin...

Given the decisions handed down by an increasingly out of touch Supreme Court, today's message will be a reading of an article Dr. Ray has written for the July 4th edition of the LA Progressive outlining some of the philosophical challenges surrounding the court's decision to strike down Roe v Wade and the suggestion that they may go even farther in taking constitutional rights away from American...