A Reframed Piece of Mike’s Mind…Starting in October, our Racial Justice Project at First Unitarian Denver is going to be initiating a conversation among our congregation about racism and reparations. My column this month provides a little of my own thinking about the background for this conversation. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote: Basically, Americans […]
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A Forested Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, my column this month is portions of the TREES sermon from August 1st.Elif Shafak, the brilliant Turkish/British author, in a perspective-taking experiment wrote: Humans do not see trees. They walk by us every day. They sit and sleep, smoke and picnic and secretly kiss in our shade. They pluck […]
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A Maladjusted Piece of Mike’s Mind…My column this month is the conclusion of the sermon from June 18th.Krishnamurti famously said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Which is another way of saying that being maladjusted is about the sanest, most spiritually mature thing we could do.I […]
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An Annual Piece of Mike’s Mind…We’ve made history this past year. For the first time since First Unitarian Denver has had a building, over a year has passed without a single public gathering in our space. I suppose this is also true for many other organizations, but I’m fond of this one. That doesn’t mean […]
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A Discerning Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, my column this month is a portion of my sermon from April 18th:…Jem Bendell advocates for what he calls Deep Adaptation, capital “A”, and he lays out four principles as a framework that everyone can begin talking about, developing, and doing right now. The four principles are resilience, […]
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A Frustrated Piece of Mike’s Mind…By request, here are the words spoken during the pastoral prayer on Sunday, March 28th, in response to the shooting in Boulder…:Very aware that I have family members and a few friends who will passionately disagree, I don’t care. I don’t care if extensive mandatory background checks, mandatory wait times, […]
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A Reminiscent Piece of Mike’s Mind… Last month, February 22nd to be exact, was the 23rd anniversary of my ordination into the Unitarian Universalist ministry, a day for which I had spent the previous four years preparing. From deciding I wanted to be a minister, to applying to seminary, to graduating, psychiatric evaluations, chaplaincy training, an […]
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An Unequivocal Piece of Mike’s Mind…In 1792, writer Mary Wollstonecraft called for the full participation of women in the rights and duties of citizenship. Her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Women becomes a foundation for the early movement for suffrage for women.In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivers her feminist speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, […]
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Witnessing a Piece of Mike’s Mind…As I write, it is the day after a large group of white people briefly took over the Capitol building in Washington DC, where a joint session of congress was taking place. The seditionists were attempting to slow or stop certification of the presidential election that all reliable authorities had […]
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A Peace of Mike’s Mind…Our Whole Souul Living Theme for December is Salvation. We don’t necessarily mean this in the heavenly sense. I personally think of it in a wholeness sense. I think everyone who lives in this world needs a little salvation from the forces that keep us compartmentalized, isolated, fractured. The whole planet […]
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