I’m not asking if such a future is possible or plausible or what changes have to happen to bring it about. I’m asking a question about the present, a question about our own social and mental and emotional and spiritual state — I’m asking if we can, through the lens of our imagination, see such a place from here.

Could it be that the best thing about democracy is the part of it that we do the worst? After all, if you look back at the history of the idea, it only really had one serious precondition. A precondition that this country stopped taking seriously as soon as it extended the franchise. Could more attention to this one prerequisite be the linchpin for healing our ailing democratic institutions and culture?

I’ve long struggled to find an MLK Day tradition that I feel does adequate justice to his life and message as a modern day prophet. So, for the first installment in what I hope will become a long standing practice, we will use Dr. King’s spotlight to highlight the message of a lesser known but sympathetically aligned fellow prophet… one whose life was also cut short by intentional violence, dare we say, assassination. I call this practice, this tradition in the making, ‘Prophets in the Graveyard.’

This episode is an homage to Easter, which I read as an invitation to struggle with one of the deepest areas of mystery: life, death, & rebirth. I want to share with you some writings from one of my most influential teachers, Stephen Jenkinson. He is author of books like “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul” & “Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.” What if the teachings of Jesus are inviting us into this deep struggle with living and dying?"

Mother's Day started as a Peace Movement, but what has it become? Between it's lost peace roots and our fraught relationship with gender-roles, can we find a meaningful space for celebration? for gratitude? for hard-earned lessons? Well, we're going to try. With a little bit of that exoteric vs. esoteric discernment that we started exploring last month, and a smidge of gratitude for the mothering we've received, and a smattering of critical reflection on the parts that didn't go so well and on some others that did, all laid out on a blanket woven from memories and stories of mothers lost, and of mothers found.

In episode two of The Pulpiteer, we'll struggle with Jesus' core prophetic teaching of the transformative power of love. We'll use two contemporaries, Marshall Rosenberg and Alfie Kohn, to help us bring this wisdom into focus and to ask some hard questions.

In this first episode of the Pulpiteer Podcast, we'll tackle this question: What is Church For? Is it a social club? Or a general purpose social justice non-profit? Is it an entertainment? A show? A musical performance? A Sunday morning day-care respite? Is it a lecture? A ceremony? A ritual? A backstage pass to the preferred afterlife? (revised version October 2024, intro music included)