The Peregrinating Parson

Hurricane Harvey is bearing down on my hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas ( time lapse webcam of downtown until the power goes out ). Landfall may not happen directly over the city, but my parents, my brother, one of my best friends, and many, many other friends and acquaintances in Corpus Christi as well as throughout the southern half of Texas are in harm's way right now. Many people have questioned why more folks didn’t evacuate, but the reality is that even the places Corpus Christi residents would evacuate to are endangered by this huge, drenching, slow-moving behemoth of a storm; San Antonio needs to be able to focus its emergency personnel on keeping its residents safe from flooding rains, not sheltering refugees from the same flooding rains. The mandatory evacuations were ordered only for people in real danger from storm surge flooding for a reason. Would I feel better if my family and friends were in, say, Dallas or Oklahoma City, away from the projected edges of the

I have no mixed feelings about statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians being removed from anywhere but battlefields, towns where military operations/headquarters occurred, and museums. I think they should be taken down.   I say this as a member of the Hampton family of South Carolina, whose son Wade Hampton was a general in the CSA and the post-war governor of the state. Wade Hampton’s statue is at the Capitol building in large part because he was the one who forced the state to abide by the requirements for readmission to the Union following the Civil War. Even so, the Hampton family was among the largest slave-holding families in the USA prior to the war. Could South Carolina lift up someone else in Wade Hampton’s place to honor in the US Capitol without hurting my feelings? Absolutely. As to all the other statues, the infographic showing the peaks of installation of these monuments speaks volumes about their actual purpose. The vast majority of non-battlefield/milit

Is ET Saved, Too? Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network August 16, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” —John 3:16-17, NRSV After NASA announced the discovery of a planet in the habitable zone of the nearby star Proxima Centauri in August, 2016, rampant speculation began about the life that might exist on the surface of that planet, imaginatively named Proxima Centauri b .* Of course, that then brought on discussion of sentient life and how we Earthlings would cope with such a discovery. One of the questions that came up involves the Christian belief in Jesus as the Savior and what sentience on another planet would do to the theology of the Incarnation. We have many options from whi

This Sunday, August 6, the Gospel text of the day is Matthew 14:13-21. It is the first of two feedings of the multitudes recorded in Matthew and one of six times the story is told in the four Gospels. This is a BIG deal in Jesus’ ministry; the only other story that appears in such close detail in all four Gospels in the crucifixion. (There are others that appear in recognizable but significantly changed variants, but these are the big ones that share substantial similarities.) Here’s the passage, from the New Revised Standard Version at http://bible.oremus.org :   13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go in