The Loft LA - Progressive Christianity in Podcast Form

We pick up today's conversation where we left off last week - we're still talking about money, desire, and American capitalism. The very basis of our free market economic system, trade - giving up something to get something else - assumes scarcity. But the Eucharist tells another story about hunger and consumption, it is the story about one who came that we might have life and have it abundantly....

How should our Christian faith and spirituality influence our economic practices? Unfortunately, most of the time when church leaders speak about money it is in the form of a request. Consequently, Christians are left to their own devices to discern how we navigate the capitalist system we were born into. In today's conversation, we do the thing your parents told you never to do with company, talk...

How should our Christian faith and spirituality influence our economic practices? Throughout the biblical text, we find stories that demonstrate the important connection between our faith and our relationship with money. The teachings and practices of Jesus and his followers suggest that Christians are to live generously. We find joy, connection, and liberation from the lure of greed and selfishne...

Conversation is at the center of our gatherings in The Loft; it's the way we do worship. In today's conversation we discuss why conversations about theology, spirituality, and religion are key to the spiritual formation process at the Loft. One reason why conversation is central to our identity is that we see this method modeled throughout the biblical text. Stories such as the woman at the well (...

Conversation is at the center of our gatherings in The Loft; it's the way we do worship. On this final Sunday of our Loft 101 series, we turn to a well-known story from John's gospel, where Jesus shares conversation with a Samaritan woman, near Jacob's well. There, deeply embedded in scripture, Jesus gives us a model for how conversation can be at the center of things. We will, of course, have to...

What is the difference between feeling welcomed within and belonging to a community? All of us have a core group of people that we feel close to, but what makes that group distinct from others? In today's conversation, we try to tease out the subtle and overt differences between welcoming and belonging to a community, spefically discussing the ways LGBTQ folx are often "welcomed" in spaces but are...

All of us have a core group of people whom we feel a particular kinship with. Jesus was no exception. Whether it was the twelve disciples, Mary, Martha, or others, Jesus had a community that he belonged to, a community where he could just be himself. In a world that prioritizes individualism, as followers of the religion of Jesus we are called to seek out and cultivate communities to which we can...

There is a lot of conversation happening on social media about theological deconstruction these days. People making arguments for it, and others pushing back against it. At its core, theological deconstruction is a movement to question some of the traditional teachings and theological arguments made by conservative and moderate Christianity. And while deconstruction is good, does it go far enough?...

Jesus was a Jew who was born and died in subjugation to Roman Empire. His body was and remains marked by gender, culture, and religion. Given this, we need to ask ourselves how might have Jesus' cultural context as a colonial subject shaped his religious and social practices. What we see in his ministry is that he sought to resist the lure of both colonial and religious power. In today's parlance,...

Let's be honest, sometimes it isn't easy to be compassionate. At our best, we are constantly striving to follow the spiritual path of radical compassion that is the religion of Jesus. But in today's polarized society, it is difficult to be at our best when it feels like our very humanity is at stake. In today's conversation, we discuss some of the challenges of being compassionate towards "difficu...

One morning as he and his disciples were walking, Jesus asked his closest friends a piercing question – "who do you say that I am?" As followers of the religion of Jesus, our answer to this question is foundational to how we practice Christianity. At the Loft, there are four fundamental values that we draw from the teachings of Jesus that inform how we practice Christianity: Compassion, Decoloniza...

In a political moment of intense polarization, and in a faith tradition where "hold on to your faith" is often read as an invitation to do battle against other perspectives, how do we carve out some generous space for re-thinking things? Somewhere, buried under the baggage of harmful legacies that seek to "defend our faith" and perpetuate oppressive systems, our church tradition also offers tools...

Gun culture is an American tradition with deep roots. It seems that every few years, after the tragic loss of life on a mass scale, we debate, yet again, about access to guns. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have already been 450 mass shootings this year alone. To be sure, the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde which targeted Black people and children, should prompt all people, regardles...

In this series, we have explored loves meaning by giving love words. We settled on a definition of love as the will to extend yourself, to nurture your own or another's spiritual growth. We explored the ethical implications of living by a love ethic, and the ways in which our social identities cause us to think about love in a multitude of ways. Throughout this series, we have sought to shape our...

In her book All About Love, bell hooks writes that whether our homes are happy or troubled, our families functional or dysfunctional our homes are our original school of love . We would like to believe that most children are born into homes where they will be loved. However, as we have discovered in our series, many adults are still learning how to love and how to distinguish between love and care...

Every person experiences love in ways unique to them. Yet, as we have learned, our experiences of love as children and young adults inform how we think about love as adults. This Sunday we continue to broaden the scope of our exploration of love to focus specifically on the Queer community. Given the pervasive reality of sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia, what are the visions of lo...

Among men in our contemporary society, our longing for love is often implicitly stated. So, when love is discussed the discussions are usually driven by women. To be sure, for most men, their longing for love is rarely, if ever, discussed. If love is the will to extend yourself, to nurture your own or another's spiritual growth, we must ask ourselves why is it that most men seem to lack the will t...

In our society, the majority of discussions about love are driven by women. Women are encouraged to learn how to love, seek love - and in turn confront their fears of not being loving or of not being loved enough. As bell hooks writes in her book Communion, "that females are born into a patriarchal world, which first invites us to make the journey to love and then places barriers in our way, is on...

Every person experiences love in ways unique to them. Yet, as we have learned throughout this series, our experiences of love as a child inform how we think about love as adults. This Sunday, we broaden the scope of our exploration of love to include our respective communities. Given the pervasive reality of white supremacy, what are the visions of love that people of color have constructed that h...

When I think about what our culture teaches us about love, I don't immediately think about it being something that's in opposition to greed. Yet, the deeper we go into our exploration of love, using wisdom from bell hooks' All About Love and our study of scripture, the more the two come into sharp contrast. By looking at love in contrast to greed, we see clearly ways that the kind of love we're ca...

Let's be honest, some people are difficult to love, especially if they have harmed us or our community. Not loving these people feels like the right thing to do, even if we intellectually know that it isn't. If love is the will to extend yourself, to nurture your own or another's spiritual growth, how might we bring our internal world into alignment with our moral commitment to love our neighbors...

Love is essential to human flourishing, it is a powerful remedy for our soul. And yet, despite our awareness of the power of love, we live in a society where the consequences of lovelessness are evident to anyone who cares to look. The spiritual path of Jesus shows us that it is possible to live a life grounded in the power of love. Given that the greatest commandment exhorts us to love God, neigh...

In our previous sermon, we defined love as the will to extend yourself for the purpose of nurturing your own or another's spiritual growth. Love is an act of the will – which begs the question, why do some people choose to love while others do not? Why do you choose love? While there are laws and commands in the bible that tell us to love God, what we see in practice in the bible are people who lo...

Everyone wants to know more about love. We want to know what it means to love, and what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved. Yet, outside of the realm of popular culture, there are few public discussions of what love is. There seems to be an assumption that human beings should instinctively know how to love. But do we? Is love innate or is it something that we grow to learn? This...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade will have devastating consequences for millions of people in America. The loss of constitutionally protected bodily autonomy will have lasting implications for marginalized persons – women, people of color, the disabled, and queer persons. You may be wondering "what does this have to do with Christianity or Christian theology?" The approach the conservative justices...