I remembered Bayard Rustin, a conscientious objector who had served time in prison during the Second World War and then became a leader in the civil rights movement, saying that being a pacifist is on… — David Hartsough
by Ken Sehested
"If you want to change people's obedience then you must change their imagination."
—philosopher Paul Ricoeur
By the time I finished my cum laude undergraduate work and with distinction seminary degree, my analytical powers were sharply honed. I was capable of researching, selecting, and presenting large troves of factual material; which I immediately put to work as an advocate for justice, peace, and human rights shaped by a passionate theological ethos.
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15 January 2012
On the first Sunday on Lent in 2007, when tensions between the US and Iran were escalating, Circle of Mercy Congregation unanimously adopted a statement (“We Say No: A Christian statement in opposition to war with Iran—see below”) opposing an attack on Iran. With the recent assassination of another Iranian scientist—the fourth to be targeted in the past two years—tensions between our two countries are again at a boiling point.
This is an appropriate time, on this observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, to reaffirm our earlier convictions.
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As a child I wasn’t aware that Memorial Day observances were intended for those felled on the battlefield. I though of it as a day of familial remembrance, honoring relatives gone before us—veterans and non-veterans alike—something akin to a low-church All Saints Day, but with flowers. Lots of flowers.
For decades, to this day, one of my uncles in southern Oklahoma assumes the duty of trimming grass, pulling weeds and placing wreaths on the Rowell, Sehested and Young burial plots in the small town of Marlow, where I was born and where my own name is carved—with only a birth day for now—in a granite slab that stretches across my immediate family’s plot, where both my father’s body and my sister’s ashes are buried.
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Some years ago, writing in the days leading up to Easter, I realized important though tragic anniversaries arrived in the days immediately following that Sunday.
“Even before our resurrection flowers have wilted, we will be confronted again with the presence of evil. Since Easter falls early in the calendar this year, in the coming resurrection week we will be forced to remember the 
enduring power of death. In 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian, was executed by the Nazis two days after Easter Sunday. This next Thursday, April 4, we will remember the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. right here in Memphis.” —continue reading “Open Letter to My Daughter: Easter morning, with the stench of death still in the air”
by Ken Sehested
What can you do to abate the harm caused by the mass murders in New Zealand mosques? Not much, in the scheme of things.
Which is not to say there’s nothing at all to do.
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So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything
has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given
us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-19
Few things are more uniform among Protestant churches the world over than Sunday school. Many are surprised to learn that this organized form of Bible study began in Britain in the 18th century. And its specific purpose was to provide literacy training for poor children. It was a ministry of reconciliation in an age when industrialization was deepening the chasm of poverty.
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“God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but the fire next time.”
—lyrics from the Negro spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep”
I haven’t been able to get Greta Thunberg’s face out of my mind, especially since Ash Wednesday.
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In his first sermon, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61, an explicit references to the
covenant terms from Mt. Sinai regarding jubilee observance and its profound
project of social, political and economic restructuring.
{Written in 1998, prior to being a founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville, NC.)
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Circle of Mercy Congregation
Asheville, NC
1 January 2012
Eleven years ago—when the calendar turned from 2000 to 20001—I got inspired by the televised review of New Year’s celebrations around the world, starting in Australia, and stayed up to write a poem. Here’s a part of it—and, by the way, the reference to “Gregory” is about Pope Gregory. It was during his reign as Roman Catholic Pontiff in the 16th century that the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar.)
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“I’ve slept since then.” That’s my Mom’s go-to line when trying, unsuccessfully, to remember something. After 90 trips around the sun, she says it more frequently.
“I’ve slept since then” also describes much of the public’s waning attention to the life and legacy of President George H.W. Bush. Given the information overload of our 24/7 news cycles and multiplicity of sources, that marker in our nation’s history is just so yesterday.
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