Read and reflect. Be renewed. Wonder. Learn. Grow. Share.
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DAILY BREATH – WEEK OF JUNE 5, 2023
MONDAY: It’s PRIDE Month!!
Start off the month with a blessing from Convergence’s Rev. Anna Golladay, who shared Queerness Is Not Criminalized by God, at an LGBTQIA+ solidarity gathering in Tennessee, the words may ring true for many and might prove shareable in worship or other gatherings.
TUESDAY: There’s nothing overtly Christian or even theological in Heather Cox Richardson’s writing – generally speaking. But her lens as a political historian is often full of wisdom and important insight to current events.
Her reflections on the debt ceiling debates, negotiations, news flashes, etc., offer broad perspective and immediate consequences. Please read her May 30, 2023 and May 31, 2023 offerings for overviews and essentials.
WEDNESDAY: Rev. Dr. Michael Piazza pulls the political into the religious sphere wondering, Who Is Russell Vought? – a clarification of the intersectional realities of equity, diversity, and justice for all, which opens our eyes to the ‘little’ battles against them that are quietly moving across the US.
Father Richard Rohr – citing Grace Ji Sun-Kim – give a concise rebuttal to Vought’s anti-woke, anti-egalitarian idea of Christianity, invoking the power of the Holy Spirit as our Divine call to consciousness and transformation – both personal and communal, in Waking Up Our Conscience. Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers echoes their invitations in she calls us into Phyllis Tickle’s The ‘Age of the Spirit’. (I’ll be holding onto this one for preaching July 2: freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – and a Jesus lens…)
THURSDAY: Walter Brueggemann invokes – and calls all of us to be agents of – prophetic vision in his lengthy biblical exegesis, The End of Imagination?
FRIDAY: Dig into the challenges of current politics, divisiveness, and social decline with Diana Butler Bass’s conversation with journalist and author Jeff Sharlet [The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (Norton)]; then linger over her Gather Ye Rosebuds: Embracing the Heart of the Year – it drips with Mary Oliver’s poetry, reflects on summer’s brevity, and considers a tendency for melancholy in the ‘heart of the year’.
