1. THE SITUATION

No matter what happens in the upcoming Republican race or the November election, the good people of the United States have been afforded a front-row seat to the Republican Civil War. While much ink and digital scribbling has been spilled over Santorum's various comments, Romney's flip-flopping, Paul's...

Minister: "Peace of the Lord be with you!"
People: "And also with you!" --The sharing of the peace, a part of many Christian worship services.

"As-salaam Alaikum" --Traditional Islamic greeting, wishing peace to each other.

Several months ago in his state of the...

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff, in his major work of philosophy, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenges to Modern Thought, explores the notion of time as partly the correlation of events and as partly characterized by metaphor. Time, he points out, is defined by conflicting...

In my book Towards a Theopoetic of the Cross, out now from the Progressive Christian Alliance Press, I argue for a form of theology-making and faith-living based in what I called my "theopoetic method" -- faith and thought constructed from the insights of four sources: the Academic, the...

On Sunday, Nov. 28 the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra premiered a series of new works by composers focused on inter-cultural music. All of the works were incredible and all of them had a deep sense of play -- not just in musicians playing instruments but also in the sense of play...

In previous articles on The Huffington Post, I had begun to argue for an experience of God without God. In this I meant recognition of what Simone Weil described this way: "I am an atheist and a Christian, for what we call God cannot possibly exist -- but the object...

Too often friends in the pulpit complain about the so-called pulpit-pew gap in the church. This is the gap where the clergy member -- educated at great expense in biblical studies, contemporary theology and biblical languages -- and the laity are on different pages theologically. Often a clergy member with...

Several years ago I moved away from the USA to pursue a graduate education in theology at the Vancouver School of Theology. That short hop over the border is a much bigger ideological jump than one might think. Somewhere along the 49th parallel perspectives shift, change and migrate. When I...

Echoing the work of John Caputo, my last post for The Huffington Post articulated a vision of God beyond theism, a concept of God that sees the word "God" as a word used to describe love. Other words sometimes used are mercy, justice, passion, joy, goodness. This suggested...

It has come up for me a few times recently, the gap between Christianity and my own personal spiritual journey. On my best days I can put myself into the "Emerging" or
'Progressive" camp, but at other times -- when I am bombarded by blogs, TV news commentators...

"I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world."
-Teilhard...