The Daily Edify

Today's episode is inspired by the suddenly gorgeous spring (summer?) weather we've been having in Chicago this week. It's also about developing a "play ethic" (as opposed to merely a "work ethic), and reflecting on how playfulness is fundamental to a generative spirituality. Dr. Stuart Brown is a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play . He de...

Today's episode is about a snippet or two from the ministry of Jesus: (1) when the disciples were arguing about which one of them was the greatest and he welcomes a child to his side to teach about true greatness; (2) when the disciples were shooing away children, but Jesus is having none of it, and instead says if all of us don't receive the kingdom of God like children we will never en...

Today's episode is about a spiritual practice I learned from Thomas Keating, the Trappist monk (1923-2018) who was a pioneer in the Christian contemplative prayer movement. For the past couple of years, I've started most days by reciting Keating's simple "welcoming practice" and offer it to you as a way to be grounded in God's love. "Welcome, welcome welcome. I w...

Today's episode is about Holy Week, the most important week in the Christian liturgical calendar. (It also a holy time for our Muslim friends who are practicing Ramanda, and our Jewish friends who are about to begin celebrating Passover.) It begins on Palm Sunday and ends on Holy Saturday, right before Easter. The four canonical gospels devote an extraordinary amount of space to the events of...

Today's episode is about "rule number six," a concept coined by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander in their thoughtful book, "The Art of Possibility." I first learned about this book about ten years ago on a clergy retreat, but was drawn to the wisdom of its practices to promote the "art of possibility." "Rule number six," one of the practices, is simple: don...

Today’s episode is about the practice of "awe walks" - which is just like it sounds. Taking a walk to cultivate awe. It doesn't cost anything - could be indoors or outdoors, though outdoors is better if you can manage it. It’s about unselfing the self, getting a wider perspective than the thoughts running through your own head.  Dacher Keltner’s new book on Awe is all over the place...

Today's episode is about a concept from Howard Thurman called "the sound of the genuine" - something we can listen for in ourselves and in others. Thurman was a towering figure in the 20th century, but it not as well-known as other civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. (to whom he was a mentor). He was a theologian, philosopher, mystic, pastor and chaplain. Feedback?...

Today's episode, released on March 17, is a nod to St. Patrick and his lesser-known breastplate prayer. Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at thedailyedify@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the recent book by Ed Yong, "An Immense World: How Animals Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms All Around Us.” Yong is a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer at the Atlantic. In this book, he opens our eyes to the immensity of the world around us. Each creature has an Umwelt, a "sensory bubble" or slice of reality we can perceive, but with that we also have the il...

Today's episode is about the idea that everyone and everything in our life can be our teacher. Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at thedailyedify@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the book of Esther, the fifth and final installment in our "Forgotten Books of the Bible" series.  The book is about Esther’s remarkable courage in the face of Haman's plot to destroy the Jewish people. The most famous line of the book comes in chapter 4, when Mordecai (Esther’s cousin, who becomes her guardian) tells her that perhaps it’s for “such a t...

Today's episode is about a little gem of a poem a friend recently shared with me - "The Most Important Thing,"  by Julia Fehrenbacher. It's a gentle, winsome invitation to create a home within ourselves, "a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things."  I wonder if you're finding space in your days to do this holy work of creating "a shelter of kind...

Today's episode is about seasons. Not so much the weather kind, but the personal and communal seasons of our lives. I share four pieces of wisdom I've learned over the years: (1) we don't control when seasons begin or end; (2) liminal seasons are hard, those times in-between seasons ; (3) seasons don't last forever; and (4) God's love is with us in all the seasons of our l...

Today's episode is about a recent book by MaryAnn McKibben Dana, "Hope: A User's Manual." I found it to be so resonant that we picked as our theme for the season of Lent at the church I serve. It's a nuanced and thoughtful take on hope, replete with practical suggestions. Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at thedailyedify@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, friends. Yo...

Today's episode is about the book of Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible for its candor, subversiveness and wisdom. This is the fourth installment in our "Forgotten Books of the Bible" series (previous episodes covered Song of Songs, Ruth, and Lamentations). The main insight we'll unpack is that Ecclesiastes teaches us that since life is fleeting, we should enjo...

Today's episode is about friendship, a spiritual practice that we sometimes neglect to our detriment. Friendship makes us human. It involves giving and receiving, mutual trust, and is crucial to our well-being. In this podcast, we touch on some wisdom on friendship from Jesus, Aristotle, Dana Robert and John O'Donohue.  Here's the "Friendship Blessing" by O'Donohue th...

Today's episode is about Ash Wednesday, the official beginning to the season of Lent in the Christian liturgical calendar. This is a day that reminds us of the beauty and preciousness of life and its mystery, a reminder that everything is temporary and we are made of the good elements of God's creation.  We reflect on a couple of lines from T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday,&qu...

Today's episode is about the spiritual practice of "beginner's mind." This simple practice is about dropping our expectations or preconceived notions about someone, something or someplace, so that we can experience it with fresh eyes, like a beginner would. We can do this with the mundane (eating breakfast, taking a walk, breathing) and the sacred (listening to music, doing yog...

Today’s episode is about finding room for lament and constructive anger through the lens of the ancient book of Lamentations, a part of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. It's the third installment in our series on the so-called “Forgotten Books of the Bible.” The context of this poetic, five-chapter book is the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonian army afte...

Today's episode is in honor of Valentine's Day, which we celebrate tomorrow. It originated as a Christian feast day to honor the memory of a Christian martyr named Saint Valentine, who lived in Rome in the late third century. But of course today it has become a juggernaut of a cultural celebration of romantic love. We look at (1) a new definition of love from Jacqui Lewis; (2) a fresh ta...

Today's episode is about the book, "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," written by the British author of fiction and non-fiction, Katherine May. The book came out in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when we are all enduring a vast "wintering" of sorts.  But she wrote it to make sense of the personal wintering she endured around the time o...

Today’s episode is about the book of Ruth, a part of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament - the second installment in our series on the so-called “Forgotten Books of the Bible.”  Ruth opens with a famine in Bethlehem. It forces Elimelech and Naomi to flee as refugees to Moab, where there is still food. In direct contradiction to other parts of the Bible (e.g. Ezra and Nehemiah), their sons, Mahlon and C...

Starting today, I'm going to publish three podcasts per week (on M, W and F) instead of five. Sorry today's is a bit late. Thanks for tuning in, friends! Today's episode is about two-degree shifts, a view of growth that focuses on small, incremental changes that compound over time. In this conversation, we mention Jesus, the movie "What about Bob?" and the writer, Annie Di...

Today’s episode is about the spiritual practice of breath prayer, an ancient and simple practice that helps us be more fully embodied. We breath, on average, 20,000 times a day and we mostly do it by default.  But ever since the sixth century CE Christians have been wedding prayer to the rhythms of breathing, an echo to the creation story in which God is said to have breathed in us the "breat...

Today’s episode focuses on “The Song of Songs,” a book of the Bible that’s often overlooked. It’s part of a short series we’re going to do on the podcast over the next five weeks. Once a week, we’ll spotlight one of the so-called “forgotten books of the Bible,” using the recent book by the same name by Robert Williamson Jr. I’m teaching a class on this book right now on Sunday mornings at the chur...