Dear Mr Trump, Mess. I’ve heard you use that word quite a bit over the past few months: The world is a mess. America is a mess. You inherited a

Dear Church Refugees and Religious Orphans, Sometimes people leave organized religion and sometimes organized religion abandons them. I don’t know which is true for you. You may have been so

Some measure of compassion is universal. Every one of us cares deeply about some people; our families, those we feel an affinity for—certainly our own well-being. We all understand selective empathy rooted in self-preservation.

Photo originally from TheWire as printed by the Atlantic. Why are you crying, Trump supporter? I mean, I know why I’m crying, but I’m just a bit confused. You seem genuinely shocked

There is a shape to every life—a specific, precise, never to be repeated space that it occupies for as long as it is here. From the very moment that life

In the wake of the brutal election season and its even more incendiary aftermath, it’s been fairly common to hear white, cisgender Christian men feigning incredulity at people looking for “safe spaces”

We all make mistakes. Every one of us can recall times when our judgment was temporarily clouded; when our emotions betrayed us and in a moment of weakness or fear or

(Evangelical trigger warning: heresy, blasphemy.) I remember the precise moment I stopped believing in hell. Over a decade ago I was at a Christmas dinner party in the home of a gay

Hell hath no fury like religious people getting religion horribly wrong, and what’s worse, we usually don’t have a clue that we’ve lost the plot when we have. There are lots of

There are three words guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of most Conservative Christians—especially the men: Sex, Sexuality, Gender. Any one of these subjects, whether spoken of explicitly or peripherally, is

Dear Friend, There’s a good chance you won’t see this, as at some point over the past year you either unfriended, unfollowed, or physically disconnected from me—or I from you. There

“If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” – Hannah and Her Sisters For the past few decades the GOP

My father died four years ago. He was on a cruise for his 70th birthday with my mother and other members of our family. We managed to catch him on

“Nobody said it would be easy.” My father always used to say this to me whenever we’d be talking on the phone about the difficult stuff of life; the obstacles

This week Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the rest of this Administration reminded us of an important lesson, one that transcends politics: saying “no” is a really easy trap to fall into—and

I just heard a beautiful sound. It was the sound of 24 million people exhaling. 24 million people of every political affiliation, from every blue and red state, from every religious tradition,

10 black girls have reportedly gone missing in the past week in Washington, DC, with 38 open cases in the area involving young women of color—but it’s only now through

I’ve had the honor of officiating many weddings over the past two decades. They’ve all been beautiful in their way, but more often than not the vows exchanged have been—naive, to say

“I feel betrayed.” These were the words that a friend of Mexican descent recently shared with me, about the Bible Belt suburban neighbors she once thought she knew and felt at

Dear Evangelicals in America, I’ve seen what’s been going on there lately. Actually, I’ve been watching you all along, and I felt I needed to reach out because something seems to have

Christian, You may likely find yourself in a church this Sunday. That’s potentially a fine, noble, and beautiful thing. There’s nothing at all wrong with gathering in a building with

They say a budget is a moral document. I agree. The President’s proposed budget and the GOP’s recent maneuvers around it, seeking to drastically reduce or eliminate funding for programs

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have LGBTQ children. I’m not sure if other parents think about this, but I often do. Maybe it’s because I have many people in my

  The first time I heard the term white privilege, I did what many white people do. I leapt immediately to defending myself from whatever accusations those words generated in my mind,