I confess that I am one of those strange people who thinks about God a lot. I am also inclined to believe that when we think about God, we think too small. This is because we start from a place of traditional God definitions. We start with the God of our great grandfathers, determine what…
Church historian and author Diana Butler Bass suggests that the questions people ask of religion have historically been "what?" questions. What should I believe? What do I need to know? These are questions religion is uniquely situated to answer. They are the questions of my patents' generation, a generation born before, during, and shortly after…
Do Americans even know what they want any longer? Most of the knee jerk answers people offer when asked what they really want seem to offer up something that, realistically, they aren't ever going to have. Some say they want to be wealthy, but that's a profoundly subjective goal. Others want to be happy, but…
Allow me to begin by saying that I have never been a fan of Jon Gruden. I have found him a bombastic ego maniac with the equivalent of a comb over who speaks like a huckster used car salesman. What anyone sees in him is beyond me. Even his coaching successes have largely come on…
I recognize that nobody is going to nominate me for the annual person of the year award in the above mentioned community, but I am good with that. I will just put something else in the spot on my shelf that I had reserved for that award. The truth is that while the immediate therapeutic…
In a world where institutional religion is mortally wounded, we can feel as if we are in an authority void. This is especially true of people who have belonged to authoritative traditions, wherein people become accustomed to pious proclamations from on high telling them what to believe. In traditions with a stronger emphasis on doctrine,…
Together we are all on a journey called life. We are a little broken and a little shattered inside. Each one of us is aspiring to make it to the end. None is deprived of pain here and we have all suffered in our own ways. I think our journey is all about healing ourselves…
It may seem like a strange concept, but many of us have a habit of getting in our own way. We may have an objective in mind, but we also have a habitual behavior that impedes our ability to achieve our goal. We may feel that, whatever the barrier is, we are completely justified in…
Most of us hear the expression "good enough" as rather negative. We tend to associate it with not being good enough. We hear the expression in almost every corner of our lives. We can be "not good enough" to get the job we want, the relationship we crave, to win a competition we are in,…
What do we do when our values and our beliefs are in conflict with the decisions our government makes? If we are honest with ourselves and aware of what is going on around us, we will start to notice how often this happens with greater frequency. When we see those situations, we will begin to…
Craig Bergland 