by Ken Sehested
We are free to act boldly because we are safe.
We are safe because we are at rest.
Read more ›Commentary
When was the last time you heard a tourism expert talk about land redistribution and debt forgiveness?
TV travel program host Rick Steves donates $4 million apartment complex for homeless woman and children
by Ken Sehested
Years ago, when I first heard Rick Steves’ squeaky voice, channel flipping late on night, I thought it was satire. This being my last resort of delaying bedtime, I continued watching. And then later, in my night owl habit of TV diversion to put my brain in neutral to (hopefully) coast toward sleep, I would stumble across his show again. Over time, I actually began to look for the “Rick Steves’ Europe” program.
Why? I don’t remember exact details now, but interspersed with touristy stuff, he actually made a few honest comments about some of the history that had occurred in that place which the local chamber of commerce doesn't mention, the kinds of things travel brochures will never say.
Read more ›Holy Saturday 2017
by Ken Sehested
Betwixt and between. Jesus’ disciples and followers are bereft and adrift. The world seems to be coming apart.
As are we.
Read more ›Funeral songs
by Ken Sehested
When I was in seminary I remember thinking that all of us, as part of our final year of study, should be required to build our own casket, hauling it around as a storage chest wherever we lived, until the day for its final use. Odd as it sounds, the “remember you are dust” charge provokes an intensity and a freedom to the living of our days, chipping away at the anxiety that too often drives our frenetic habits.
Along that same line, one element of our congregation’s seven-week Lenten reflection group was beginning and ending each meeting by listening to songs participants’ want at their funeral service, in keeping with the season’s invitation to reflect on our own mortality.
Read more ›The United States at War
There have been only 17 years that the US has not been involved in a war since 1776
“We’re at War!”
And We Have Been Since 1776: 214 Years of American War-Making
Danios, loonwatch.com blog, 20 December 2011
Year-by-year Timeline of America’s Major Wars (1776-2011)
1776 – American Revolutionary War, Chickamagua Wars, Second Cherokee War, Pennamite-Yankee War
Read more ›Follow-up on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.
by Ken Sehested
¶ Connecting the dots—or, as we now say, intersectionality. “But when, exactly, did the post-civil rights era begin? Arguably it was fifty years ago today when in a speech [‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,’ aka ‘Declaration of Independence From the War in Vietnam’] at Harlem’s Riverside Church Martin Luther King Jr. definitively broke ranks with the liberals he once considered allies. . . .
“The very liberals who supported and signed civil rights legislation while waging war in Vietnam would wind up in the years ahead being the chief promulgators of new laws that criminalized the daily lives of the urban poor and authorized the militarization of municipal police forces. The 1968 Safe Streets Act, signed by Johnson, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building up law enforcement and the criminal justice apparatus—astronomically more than was ever spent on the same president’s anti-poverty programs. This legislation would lead to a slew of other law-and-order policies that together helped lead us into the age of mass incarceration.” —Eric Tang, “‘A Society Gone Mad on War’: The Enduring Importance of Martin Luther King’s Riverside Speech,” The Nation
¶ Can’t turn back now. “At first blush it may seem counterintuitive to elevate [the ‘Beyond Vietnam’] speech above the watershed ‘I Have a Dream’ speech delivered four years earlier, or the "[I Have Been to the] Mountaintop’ speech he would give on the eve of his death. But if King's address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made him into an American icon, his Riverside Church speech announced him as a genuine prophet for social justice, one who willingly sacrificed his hard-won status to defy an empire.” —Peniel Joseph, “This speech made Martin Luther King Jr. revolutionary,” CNN
Read more ›Palms, Passion, Politics and Prayer
A Palm Sunday sermon
by Ken Sehested
Text: Matthew 21:1-13
Sunday 17 April 2011
Circle of Mercy Congregation
Before I begin, a word of explanation about our special communion table cloth. No doubt you’ve seen the photo on this banner many times before. It’s probably the most widely published photo in human history, and it is the first clear image of an illuminated face of the earth. Officially, it’s known as “The Blue Marble.” It got that name because the astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance from about 28,000 miles high.
One other bit of trivia: originally the photo had the South Pole at the top of the image. (How confusing is that?) It was rotated, with the north at the top, before being distributed.
Read more ›Health care as a fundamental human right
by Ken Sehested
Last fall one of our local journalists, who has an “answer man” column devoted to readers’ questions, was asked about hospitalization insurance coverage, particularly why some of the services received were covered by 
insurance but others (the ones in small print about “out-of-network” exceptions) were not.
The hospital president wrote an explanation. This was my response.
Read more ›The sinister side of Judeo-Christian Scripture and tradition regarding women
A brief summary of texts
by Ken Sehested
Thanks to our recent presidential election, more people know the meaning of “misogyny.” As with so many lingering patterns of structural discrimination (which is different from, and far worse than, simple prejudice), gender inequity remains even in societies considered culturally “advanced.”
Within the Judeo-Christian world, resistance to gender equity has deep roots in Scripture and church history. While it is true that alternative texts and traditions can be identified in these sources, it is still imperative that we openly confront and address the elemental texts and pretexts authorizing overt and covert patterns of domination.
Read more ›The things that make for peace
The purpose, promise and peril of interfaith engagement
by Ken Sehested
The only way I know to pluck from the hearts of enemies their desire
to destroy us is to remove from their lives the sense that, for their own physical
and spiritual survival, they must. —David James Duncan
In the early weeks of 2011, during the Arab Spring uprising, Egyptian blogger Nevine Zaki posted a photograph from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. It showed a group of Muslims bowing in prayer, surrounded by other people standing hand-in-hand, facing outward, a human security wall. Zaki affixed this caption: “A picture I took yesterday of Christians protecting Muslims during their prayers.” [1]
Read more ›