"We are not free from triggers, but we can develop the skills to recognize those triggers when they happen."

In this episode I work line by line through a dense passage from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the one about the oppressed having internalized the image of the oppressor and become fearful of freedom — and ask what it has to do with an ordinary Sunday morning.

I start on a running trail, with two dogs and a man who tenses up. One dog is what I call a stimulus-jerked puppet: it reacts because reacting is all it has. The other has learned some space between the trigger and the response — until its handler's anxiety travels down the leash. From there I get to a canceled credit card, thirty-six seconds of unkindness to a bank employee, and why I'd rather tell you that story than let you think I'm finished with this work.

Then Freire, a line at a time. Oppression as something that dehumanizes everyone who participates in it, including those it benefits materially. Autonomy as owning your choices even when they are coerced. Responsibility and accountability as the opposite of entitlement. The Portuguese word conquista, which is broader than the English "conquest" and means something closer to won through struggle. And freedom not as the absence of obligation, but as the ability to choose the relationships that bind you in obligation.

Our Great World House marks the 105th anniversary of Freire's birth. Judy Mayo reads the Voice of Wisdom. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

"Your body is neither an inconvenience nor tertiary to your existence." This episode is an invitation into embodied practice — and a correction to something the summer sermon series may have implied.

Over July, the four-part Social Change series read Deepa Iyer's ecosystem through gut, heart, head, and spirit. That sequence could sound like a ladder. This message says otherwise: the mystery underneath our words is about the wholeness of the thing, not the hierarchy of the thing. Gut, heart, and head do come online in developmental order — infancy, the terrible twos, the teenage brain — but the work of midlife is reintegration, not ascent.

The heart of the episode is a story about two teachers. The Dalai Lama, who says of himself that he is a simple monk working toward his death. And Stephen Jenkinson, the palliative care writer whose Die Wise argues that we know everyone else will die but do not know it about ourselves until the bad news arrives — and who, six months after his own Parkinson's diagnosis, told a retreat that he had not been ready either. Asked what he would change, he named embodied practice: yoga, breathing, meditation, begun thirty years earlier.

From there: why Sunday in a liberal religious tradition runs head-first and top-down, why the new Wednesday evening program runs bottom-up, the yin-yang rotating around love at the center, joy found under a rock called grief, and ego in the second half of life as the thing you cannot think your way past.

The Great World House marks a hunger strike at an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington. The Voice of Wisdom, from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, is read by Fran Holt. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

"It is possible to be free. Not free from anger, or shame, or fear — but free among them: transparent to the light, a window the light shines through." The final service in the four-part series reading Deepa Iyer's social change ecosystem through a developmental lens arrives at spirit — not a fourth faculty, but the awareness that has been practicing all along.

The sermon slows down on purpose: three mindful breaths, and a practice of Cynthia Bourgeault's teaching that in any situation we either brace, harden, and resist — or soften, open, and yield. From there, the whole series gathers into six lines: the immature gut metastasizes hardship into rage; the mature gut metabolizes it into action. The immature heart, shame — the mature heart, healing. The immature head, fear — the mature head, foresight. And the reveal: for three weeks the question has been what comes up when you watch the news? The part of you that could answer — the watcher — is what we mean by spirit.

The message names the near enemies honestly (maturity is not freedom from fear, guilt, or anger, but the capacity to feel them completely without the trap), introduces the two roles that open to active conduits of spirit — Guides, teachers who have been there, and Weavers, shepherds of the whole ecosystem — and closes with Bourgeault's stained-glass window: shards, artisan, and the light that harmonizes all.

The Great World House looks ahead to the August 12 eclipse, the Perseids on the darkest night, and the sky's own lesson: attention without grasping. The Voice of Wisdom is read by Frank Sanders. Delivered at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

The third sermon in The Pulpiteer's four-part series reading Deepa Iyer's social change ecosystem — from her book Social Change Now, the 2025–26 Unitarian Universalist Association common read — through a developmental lens drawn from the Enneagram's centers: gut, heart, head, and spirit.

This week: the thinking triad, whose underlying feeling is fear, and the three ecosystem roles where head energy finds its work — Visionaries, Builders, and Storytellers. Along the way: Frank Herbert's Litany Against Fear as a thinking-triad practice, the mind as a prediction engine and the mental models it runs, why the seven-to-one negativity ratio makes us catastrophize, wisdom as the ability to see dangers at their true size, analysis paralysis and doom-scrolling as fear's immature forms — and the mature transformations: fear metabolized into imagination, into architecture, and into meaning. The Great World House segment returns to the Guadalupe River, where new flood warning sirens sounded during this week's high water — foresight built into fifty feet of steel. The sermon also visits the Legacy Museum's one-line story of race in America, and closes with the quiet mind.

The Voice of Wisdom, from Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram, is read by Pat Berthold.

Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

Read the companion essay on Medium: "Think Social Change" by Eric Hepburn.

The season two finale of The Pulpiteer is a love letter — to a congregation, to podcast listeners, and to a word that has been weaponized for too many people: faith.

Preached on Flag Day, the service begins with the Great World House reframing the flag not as a banner of war but as a covenant — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as promises that carry duties, renewed by ordinary people in small rooms who deliberate, vote, and stay at the table. The Voice of Wisdom, read by Michelle Augustine, comes from Ross Gay's The Book of Delights: flowers placed by anonymous hands into the fist of a statue, and what that impulse says about human nature.

The sermon walks the narrow path between pollyannaish optimism and soul-destroying pessimism, and lands on a distinction worth keeping: hope is a future thing; faith is a present-tense practice. Along the way: the Buddhist eightfold path as eight gauges to keep in the green, leadership as contagion, why you are enough and worthy — and special, but not that special — Brené Brown on foreboding joy, the boxes we tape shut and bequeath to the people we love, healing as a duty rather than an indulgence, and Margaret Mead's small committed group with their levers on the boulder.

Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas, at the close of the second season and second year of this shared ministry.

The second sermon in The Pulpiteer's four-part series reading Deepa Iyer's social change ecosystem — from her book Social Change Now, the 2025–26 Unitarian Universalist Association common read — through a developmental lens drawn from the Enneagram's centers: gut, heart, and head; plus spirit.

This episode turns from gut to heart: the feeling triad, whose underlying struggle is shame, and the two ecosystem roles where heart energy finds its work — Caregivers and Healers. Along the way: Brené Brown's distinction between shame ("I am a bad thing") and guilt ("I did a bad thing"), the oxygen-mask problem of self-care for people who pour themselves out, a river parable that separates the caregiver's call from the healer's, why the ecosystem view frees us from ranking our role above anyone else's, and how the one-year anniversary of the July 2025 Texas Hill Country floods shows both roles at work in Kerr County today.

The Great World House reflection honors the flood anniversary and the ongoing work of recovery. The Voice of Wisdom, from Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram, is read by Keith Hutchinson.

Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

Read the companion essay on Medium: "Feel Social Change" by Eric Hepburn.

We begin a four-part series exploring Deepa Iyer's social change ecosystem through the lens of human development — starting where the body starts: in the gut, with those who move first. The Disrupters, Frontline Responders, and Experimenters act before certainty arrives.

When rituals centered on human institutions lose their luster, where can we turn to find renewed meaning and connection? The flower communion is one gesture toward a deeper answer - that nature is our oldest and wisest teacher, and that we can return to her when we wish to learn how to be with one another.

"For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have." - Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr..

What is the simplicity on the far shore of complexity?

Why brave the treacherous seas of complexity to get there?

We’ll struggle today with how covenant - a set of promises that binds a community - can be a source for the courage and how, through combining the work of Parker Palmer and James Luther Adams, we might ask the deep question of how to bring about what Adams called the kingdom of God and what Dr. King called Beloved Community.