I am a “cradle” Methodist which means I started attending Sunday School as soon as I could
walk and sit on a chair. I attended Sunday School all though elementary school, high school and college. In addition, during high school, I attended Methodist Summer Institute, a wonderful week at a camp in the mountains complete with worship and Bible study.

Unitarian Minister and Abolitionist Theodore Parker said it, Civil Rights leader and
American prophet Martin Luther King, Jr., affirmed it, but sometimes I’m just not so
sure:

Try proclaiming this bit of good news to, say, the Ukrainians, cruelty, brutality, barbaric
and senseless destruction reducing their country to rubble.

Where does one start? Dr. John Cobb at age 96 is probably the world’s preeminent process philosopher, a pioneering eco-theologian, author of over 50 books, and the co-founder and still guiding light of The Center for Process Studies, Pando Populus, and the Institute for Ecological Civilization. Born in Japan, residing in California, he might be called a rock star in
modern China where he helps to coordinate 23 centers of the Institute for Postmodern Development in China, (which he founded in 2005). How he was able to make himself available to talk with eight friends of People of Faith for Justice on January 12 I can’t imagine, but he did.

I recently had a brief conversation with Jennifer Adams, CEO of Lumina Alliance (formerly RISE SLO + Stand Strong). She talked about all of the ways that Lumina Alliance serves individuals and families in our community, and works for a community free from sexual and intimate partner violence.

Two numbers leapt off the page of the New York Times: 170,000 and 2,000,000,000,000. The first is the number of lives lost in two decades of fighting in Afghanistan and the second is the dollars it cost(1) (or perhaps we should say it initially cost since it was funded on credit, the interest expected to add another $6.5 trillion; commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are estimated to add another $2 trillion, those costs to peak after 2048(2)).

I paused then and I continue to pause now, at what she had said.

In this case, she was a parishioner and because she was appreciably ahead of her time in so many ways (Saint Peg, we called her, Mother Inferior she called herself in retort), I wondered at her identifying herself as an aspiring pacifist. Years later, I still wonder, does not the idea of being an aspiring pacifist sound a little like being a little bit pregnant, which is to say, either you’re all in or it doesn’t count?

 There’s an old story about a farmer who receives a pastoral call by his minister. The
farmer loved his farm and was delighted to give his pastor a tour. He loaded his pastor
into his jeep and off they went. Fields of corn as high as an elephant’s eye and golden
wheat swaying in the breeze as far as the eye could see. The Pastor, amazed by the
beauty of the sight surrounding him said, “I have never seen anything like this. You and
the Lord have a wonderful partnership on this farm!”