The Pulpiteer

Trust. Some stories from my experience and some work from Brene Brown on BRAVING. Hope you enjoy. Shout out to Soul Matters for the theme & supporting materials.

Explore the Seventh Chapter (Things Fall Apart) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill. Come prepared to share, so will I. We'll see if we can't do some healing and grow past, or perhaps through, crisis, together. Also, we'll make some space to laugh together with some salty humor on the eve of International Transgender Day of Visibility.

This week is a special episode as I'm joined in the pulpit by Sky Makare, a young woman from the San Gabriel congregation. Tune in as we explore issues of beauty and ugliness, cat calling and the threat of sexual violence, and the many unfairness's and injustices that continue to negatively impact the lives of women in today's America.

Spurred by Texas HB 2548, Chas Moore of Austin Justice Coalition invited me and other community members to a press conference on February 20, 2025. Join me for an exploration of the White Christian Nationalist roots of these anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion bills - and a call to our brothers, sisters, and siblings who identify that way to a deeper relationship with God, the world as...

What does it mean to be a healthy man in today's America? In today's world? Are we providing our young men with prosocial and compassionate ways to express their masculinity - some troubling data suggests not. How do our historical and cultural understandings of masculinity need to change to adapt to feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism without simply regressing to patriarchy and su...

Read the Sixth Chapter (Expanding Our We) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill. Come prepared to share, so will I. We'll see if we can't do some healing and expand our we, together. Starting and ending with the Metta Meditation, we'll explore who is worthy of the protections of being human? Is there a threshold beyond which those who are damaged or do d...

Join us this week for a colloquy on race through the lens of the magical negro. I am honored to have as partner and co-conspirator in this work - Mr. Spoon. Hear the song never sung & more...

Engage with the World is inspired and named for chapter five of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World . In it, we struggle with what it means to hold love at the center, with how we so easily and often get it wrong, with the eternal search for a place to stand and a lever to move the world.

We explore the power of story to blind us to the world that is, to remake the world as it wishes to become, and to transform our relationships with one another. 

A good-old-fashioned fire-communion, some Dr. Seuss for the kid in all of us, and some James Baldwin to invite us deeper than we ever wanted to go. That sounds like the recipe for a strong start to the new year. Join us won't you? ...God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time...

This week is a live recording inspired and named for chapter four of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World . If you, as a podcast listener, would like to read along, we’d love the company. Our plan is to do a chapter a month, usually on the third Sunday of each month - with the podcast coming out the fo...

What is the right relationship between body, mind, emotion, and spirit? And what does any of that have to do with presence? What if these questions aren't two different ones, but one question from two perspectives. What if one pathway to both questions lies upon the path of meditation? Let's explore...

This week is a live recording and it is inspired by (and named after) chapter three of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World .

This episode is inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass & addresses itself to the American national election that just passed. Special thanks to the Haudenosaunee people for their capacious sharing of the Thanksgiving Address.

What does Sanctuary mean? What do we need from our sanctuary - from our sacred spaces - in this moment? Can they be safe enough for us to complete the dissolution necessary to our transformation? Safe enough to fall all the way apart? Would that allow us to reconfigure ourselves in ways previously unimagined? Do concepts like 'wisdom' and 'stranger' help us in this struggle? Join us and let's find...

This mythological and mystical story comes to us from renowned storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw and is the second in our Smoke Hole series. It is a tale of patience and boldness, of duty and nature's allies, and ultimately about distinguishing between what is essential and what is superfluous. Join us around our imaginary fire as we spin a tale from the troves of old Europe.

This episode is inspired by chapter two of our congregational read for this year, Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World . For those of you who don’t yet know, Prentis Hemphill (They/Them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, so...

Pet Blessing, Georgetown Pride 2024, Hurricanes, Elections, a need to slow down, and we still need to find time to reflect on our Soul Matters topic for the month: Living Love Through the Practice of Deep Listening. That a lot going on, we'll see if we can't find some space to breathe as we contemplate all these things, our perfect storm.

Please join us for a special bonus episode this week, as I have the honor of being interviewed by Sunny (15) and Stella (13), two members of our San Gabriel congregation. From ice cream, to pets, to favorite clothes & time travel - join us for a fun ride.

This mythological and mystical story comes to us from renowned storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw and is the first in our Smoke Hole series. It is a tale of dark energies and bewitchment, power and corruption, of bloodlust and unlikely allies, and ultimately about the victory of the simple and faithful over the complex. Join us around our imaginary fire as we spin a tale from the troves of old Europe.

Based on the Preface and First Chapter (Vision) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill. Come listen as we explore and share. We'll see if we can't do some healing and cast a vision, together.

I've given myself a few weeks to begin to digest my experiences at the Orphan Wisdom School in Ontario. So this is the first part of sharing what I learned there.

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue. – Clearing by Martha Postlewaite

If we subscribe to this progressivist view of history, of evolution, of the unfolding of life in the universe – a view nominally supported by the hearts of the great wisdom traditions, by our own transient observations, and by the findings of science (at least in the human or Earthly near term – perhaps not on the longer galactic time scale). Well, if we subscribe to that – one element of our prog...

We often think of justice work as 'external' - we focus our attention on the parts of cultures and systems and institutions that lie outside of us, outside of our control or influence. But this focus makes two mistakes - first, it presumes that we are not implicated in systems and cultures we choose not to identify with, and second, it fails to recognize that our ability to replace the cul...