The Progressive Reverend

Every year, Lent arrives quietly. No glitter. No fireworks. No grand announcement. Just ashes pressed onto foreheads and a whisper: Remember who you are.  Lent is not about spiritual theatrics. It is about slowing down enough to notice our own lives.  We live in a culture that prizes speed and noise. We scroll. We hustle. We perform. Even our exhaustion feels competitive. Lent interrupts that rhythm. It invites us to step off the merry-go-round and ask a deeper question: What in my life is life-giving? And what is not?  For centuries, Christians have marked these forty days by adding or subtracting something. Fasting from habits that numb us. Taking up practices that root us. Not to prove devotion. Not to impress God. But to become more awake.  Sometimes subtraction is necessary. We let go of patterns that drain us. We name resentments we’ve been rehearsing. We let go of the need to win every argument. We unplug from the constant stream of outrage. We notice the smal...

There are moments when the world feels like it has split open. A school shooting in a small community. The kind of place where everyone knows the hallways, where teachers remember siblings, where grief travels faster than the news cycle. When something like this happens, it doesn’t stay contained. It moves through memory, through relationships, through the nervous system of anyone who has ever stood in a classroom and promised children they would be safe. There is no tidy theology for this. No sentence can make it make sense. There is only lament. And alongside the heartbreak, another reality is already surfacing. When the identity of the shooter intersects with queerness or transness, we know what often follows. Grief becomes weaponized. Entire communities are blamed. Fear hardens into rhetoric. Rhetoric spills into policy and playgrounds. Those who are already navigating a world that questions their dignity suddenly feel the ground shift again. This is where the church must be v...