This week, I was reading a book about Sarah Grimke. Grimke was an active abolitionist and a mother of the women’s suffrage movement. The thing that was striking to me was that Grimke didn’t find her calling until she was in her mid-40s. No longer the…
Politics has no place in the pew or in the pulpit. That’s a phrase we often hear uttered. Let’s look at what’s behind these references to politics in the church. If by political we mean campaigns, governmental structures and processes, or the encoura…
“Everything changes when the people you love are at risk.” I recently attended a conference for pastors and other professional church leaders where issues of race and justice were part of the discussion. Too often conversations like this remain abstr…
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It’s that time of year again. The days when haunted houses and apple orchards are filled with visitors. The time when you can eat candy corn by the fistful and walk down grocery store aisles filled top to bottom with assorted bite-sized candy. And th…
Earlier this week, the Quad Cities experienced what Winnie the Pooh would surely have called a blustery day. It was windy. The kind of wind that kindled fires in fields of dry crops. The kind of wind that would knock someone right off their bike. As…
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There is a fear epidemic in America. We are a people full of fear. Swapping stories of fright has become our national pastime. If you want to kill anything in politics these days, just get people good and scared about what some action or legislation…
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St. Francis of Assisi is remembered on October 4. Many churches have a blessing of the animals and remember the various ways he cared for all who were suffering. St. Francis believed that humans and animals were created by God to be a family and to l…
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A few weeks ago, I was on my way back to Davenport from a wedding in Wisconsin. It was a beautiful drive, but I was too busy mulling over new responsibilities to take much notice. The to-do list that comes with starting a different life was weighing…
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Muslim leader Dalil Boubakeur had an idea for addressing the shortage of mosques for Muslim communities in France – convert some unused churches into mosques. It’s not hard to see why the idea occurred to Boubakeur, a Frenchman. Many of the 45,000 ch…
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It happens nearly every morning. After quite an effort, we are all ready to go and I open the back door for our three-year-old daughter. I hold the door open with my left arm, heavily laden with my work bag and a diaper bag filled with bottles, extra…
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The ticket agent with the neatly tucked-in blue neck scarf never deserved the abusive language thrown her way. It was bad. The guy in front of me chewed her up like a smoothie blender gone haywire. I watched the nastiness unfold from only three feet…
In this era of computer search engines, it doesn’t take much effort to learn what words and phrases do the heavy lifting in our language. The frequency with which certain words get used reveals a great deal about the culture we inhabit. Three psychol…