Religion Unplugged

For a lot of reasons, communicating well is harder than it looks. One of the reasons is that people on the other end of the equation sometimes don’t listen any better than I talk. Often I’ve asked myself whether any of us actually hears anything accurately.

Author Kaitlyn Schiess wrote “The Ballot and The Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go From Here” to address how the Bible has been employed in the United States’ political discourse. Schiess addresses what she sees as proper uses and misuses of the Bible when we talk about politics.

“The Hiding Place” tells the true story of Corrie ten Boom, who with her sister, Betsie, and her father helped over 800 Jews escape capture in Nazi Germany by hiding them in their home before being arrested by the Nazis themselves and put into a consecration camp.

As I watched the hit docu-series "Shiny, Happy, People," I realized I needed to address a different set of questions: How did I — a child raised into that organization — break free? How can anyone break free of misguided, fundamentalist religious movements or cult-like organizations and, yet, still retain any kind of religious belief?

The Edina Community Lutheran Church in Minneapolis created a stir recently by posting part of a Pride Month service that featured a radically modernized take on the faith passed down through the ages — the Sparkle Creed.

Generosity towards religious organizations grew slightly between 2021 and 2022, despite total U.S. charitable giving declining after two record years.

As my years and experiences have accumulated, I’ve come to recognize something I hardly imagined in my youth: that God is so big and wonderful and complex that no one group — even my own — and no individual has a monopoly on God. Nobody understands it all.