Five Blog Posts You Should Read

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The grief has been two-fold: mourning the death of my mother, and mourning the ways in which my relationship to God and the Church has changed.

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As a person who is committed to a faith that is centered around the life of a 1st century Palestinian who from the beginning stood with the marginalized, the rejected and isolated, the non-normative of society, and even himself experienced state-sanctioned violence and execution, because of his life – I believe and confess and affirm that black lives matter. Muslim lives matter.

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Mohammed, his wife, and their seven children fled from that violence. They headed north, and sought refuge in the city of Samarra for nearly a year before the effects of ISIS drove them further north to Kirkuk, where they started over yet again

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All those things are true, and yet, I find myself dwelling on her absence, on the way someone can simply go away from our every day existence.  I haven’t seen Loretta in more than 10 years, and still, to think she is gone . . . The presence of her absence must be loud and clanging for her family.

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Small goals acknowledge my humanity, and I like working and living in full awareness of my finite humanness. Write a book? That’s big. But write 2,000 words a day? I can do that, plus get enough sleep and hang out with my kids when they get home.