Gloria Steinem died this week at the age of 92. Hearing the news took me back to the religious culture of my youth, where she was anything but a popular figure.

She was despised, ridiculed and condemned. I heard more than a few sermons warning us that Steinem and the “women’s lib” movement were straight from the depths of hell—a threat to the family, the church and the natural order of things.

One of those preachers was my father. I don’t say that to put him down. He preached what he had been taught, just as I did for a while.

Women were honored in the religious culture of my youth, as long as they remained within the roles men and the church had assigned them.

My experiences, my studies and my willingness to listen to women eventually led me beyond what I had been told about Gloria Steinem to what she actually believed.

“A feminist,” Steinem said, “is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”

She put it another way: “Being a feminist means that you see the world as whole instead of half.”

I am sorry it took me so long to see what she saw.

Gloria Steinem spent her life asking us to imagine a world in which women had voices, choices and power of their own, not at the expense of men, but alongside them. Equality does not diminish our humanity. It enlarges it.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped preaching what I had been taught.

I began listening. And Gloria Steinem was one of the voices that helped me hear.

I cannot claim to have read everything Wendell Berry wrote. Not even close.

I have read enough, however, to know that his was a voice we needed, and still need.

Berry, who died this week at the age of 92, was a poet, prophet, novelist, essayist, farmer, environmentalist and social critic. But perhaps all those descriptions amount to one thing: he was a man who paid attention.

He paid attention to the land beneath his feet. To the food on his table. To the people living nearby. To the damage we do when we value efficiency more than care, profit more than people, and progress more than the places and communities we leave behind.

After studying and teaching away from home, Berry returned to Kentucky and spent the rest of his life rooted there. He farmed. He wrote. He walked. He watched. And he kept reminding us that we belong to one another, and to the earth from which we came.

His Christianity was not primarily about escaping this world. It was about loving this one.

That may be what I appreciate most about him.

Berry understood that care for the earth, care for our neighbors and care for our own souls are not separate responsibilities. They are different expressions of the same love. We cannot mistreat the land without eventually mistreating the people who live upon it. We cannot turn our neighbors into commodities without diminishing ourselves. And we cannot claim to love God while treating God’s creation as disposable.

Among the words of his that have stayed with me are these:

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

I love that phrase: “the lasting world.”

Berry does not say that those who have mastered the correct doctrine will find it. Nor those who have accumulated the most, achieved the most or attracted the largest following.

The lasting world belongs to those who have learned to love one another.

Wendell Berry spent his life pointing us toward that lasting world.

And now, whatever happens, I trust he has found his way there.

Younger readers may see the name Mel Gibson and ask, “Who is Mel Gibson?”

Fair question.

There was a time when Gibson was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. He gave us Lethal Weapon, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. He has had his famous moments.

He has also had his infamous ones.

The latest came at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. As Gibson walked onto the stage, he passed behind an American Sign Language interpreter who was signing for members of the audience. Gibson began waving his hands, apparently imitating and mocking the interpreter.

For no apparent reason.

The interpreter was simply doing her job. More importantly, she was making the event accessible to people who otherwise might have been excluded. She represented something generous and decent: making sure everyone in the room could participate.

Gibson saw an opportunity for a joke.

I am especially sensitive to this because the first church I ever pastored was a congregation for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. I entered that experience without always knowing the right language or fully understanding Deaf culture. I am still learning. But I learned very quickly that American Sign Language is not a collection of amusing gestures. It is a rich language through which people communicate, worship, tell stories, express love and build community.

To mock it is not simply to make fun of an interpreter’s movements. It is to make someone else’s language, and, by extension, an entire community, the punchline.

After the criticism began, Gibson apologized, describing what he did as “spontaneous thoughtless idiocy.” He said there was no malicious intent.

Perhaps there wasn’t.

But that may be the most troubling part.

What causes a grown man to see someone who looks, moves, speaks or communicates differently and instinctively make fun of them? Why is mockery the spontaneous response? Why does another person’s difference so easily become entertainment?

We have seen this before.

During his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump publicly mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a congenital condition affecting the movement of his arms. He jerked his arms in front of a crowd while impersonating the reporter’s voice. Trump later denied he was imitating Kovaleski’s disability at all—but the video is still there for anyone to watch, and the crowd’s laughter is still there too. That image remains one of the most disturbing moments of his political career, not because it was unusual, but because it wasn’t punished. It was rewarded with a nomination, then an election.

And now Mel Gibson, whom Trump appointed one of his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, does something remarkably similar.

Maybe this is why the two get along.

Cruelty does not always arrive shouting. Sometimes it walks onto a stage smiling, makes a few exaggerated gestures and waits for the audience to laugh. That is how cruelty becomes culture: not through decree, but through permission. Public figures teach us what is acceptable simply by getting away with it. When a president mocks a person with a disability and pays no real price, some people learn the behavior is safe. When a celebrity mocks an ASL interpreter and the story fades in a news cycle, some people learn it’s harmless fun.

But the person being mocked is rarely the only one who receives the message. Everyone who shares that difference receives it too: You are amusing to us.

Gibson’s apology is better than no apology. He was also right about one thing: it was thoughtless idiocy. But the more important question isn’t whether he’s sorry. It’s why this particular kind of idiocy comes so spontaneously to begin with, and why it found no real cost at all when a candidate for president did it first.

Sunday morning, while many of you were sitting in a church building, I was on a golf course with my son, Daniel, discovering that golf also requires faith, patience and frequent appeals to God.

Most of my shots were bad. Most of his were good. But all of it was big fun.

There was no sanctuary, no choir and no sermon, unless you count the advice Daniel occasionally offered after watching another one of my golf balls travel in a direction neither God nor the course designer intended.

But there was fresh air, laughter, conversation and a few uninterrupted hours with someone I love. Frankly, I have attended worse worship services.

Unfortunately, golf also made the news this past week for something far less life-giving.

Good Good Golf began as a YouTube channel and grew into one of golf’s most successful entertainment and merchandise brands. Last week, it posted an advertisement promoting a new driver created in partnership with Callaway.

In the ad, Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark sees golfer and content creator Alexis Miestowski reaching toward the driver in his golf bag. He rushes at her, forcefully shoves her to the ground, stands over her and says, “Do not touch my new driver.”

Later, a man takes the same club out of the bag and swings it without receiving similar treatment.

The video was intended as a parody about a golfer who was obsessed with his new driver. Apparently, someone thought it was funny.

Four weeks ago, Daniel and I played this same course on a Sunday morning. The clubhouse had an entire wall filled with Good Good merchandise—shirts, hats and other items carrying the logo of one of golf’s fastest-growing brands.

I considered buying a hat. Then I worried someone might see “Good Good” on my head and assume I was making a claim about my golf game. I decided that level of false advertising might be unethical.

Sunday, the wall was empty. The Good Good merchandise was nowhere to be seen.

I don’t know whether the clubhouse removed it because of the advertisement, so I won’t claim that it did. But the timing was impossible to miss. Four weeks ago, Good Good was a brand golfers were invited to wear. Yesterday, it was a name no longer on display.

That is how quickly a cultural message can change what a name represents. From Good Good to Really Bad.

The advertisement was staged. Miestowski knew what was going to happen and was not injured. But that defense misses the point. The question is not whether the shove was real.

The question is: What were we supposed to find funny?

A man knocking a woman to the ground?

A woman being physically punished for touching something that belonged to a man?

A golf club being treated as more valuable than the person reaching for it?

Or was the joke simply the familiar image of an angry man standing over a woman after using his strength against her?

Advertisements do more than sell products. They tell stories about who matters, who holds power and whose humiliation can be used for someone else’s amusement.

This one told us that a man’s attachment to a possession was funny enough to excuse aggression. It told us that violence against a woman could be exaggerated into comedy. It told young men watching that domination can be entertaining, and young women that being shoved to the ground can be reduced to a punchline.

Culture is shaped not only by what we openly endorse, but also by what we repeatedly laugh at, excuse and learn not to notice.

The companies eventually acknowledged the seriousness of what they had approved and published. The video was removed. Good Good and Callaway apologized. Callaway acknowledged that although Good Good produced the ad, Callaway had approved it, and that the approval should never have happened. Callaway ended the partnership and committed $1 million to organizations working to prevent violence against women and assist victims. Good Good also withdrew as sponsor of an upcoming PGA Tour event.

Those actions matter. Accountability requires more than asking the public-relations department to locate the word “sincerely.” It means accepting consequences, repairing the damage and making sure it doesn’t happen again.

But accountability after the fact does not make the original question disappear: How did this idea travel through writers, performers, producers and corporate approval processes without someone stopping to ask “What the heck are we doing?!”

This advertisement did not create our culture’s contempt for women. It reflected it. When powerful men, including the most powerful man in the country, publicly belittle women who question them, they make that behavior seem permissible. The lesson travels downward: women may be mocked, humiliated or intimidated when they get too close, ask the wrong question or touch something a man considers his.

Yesterday, Daniel and I both carried drivers. Neither of us pushed anyone down for touching one.

We used them for their intended purpose, although, judging by some of my shots, that claim may be difficult to defend.

If golf is going to be my new church, perhaps that is the first lesson: people matter more than possessions, laughter should never require a victim, and the best rounds are not always measured by the score.

I received a text message this week: “Help put biblical lessons back into SPRINGFIELD schools. It starts with your signature.”

I did not click the link. Consider this column my unsigned response.

If you’re thinking about signing the petition, we should probably talk about what we mean by “biblical lessons.”

I have spent most of my life studying, preaching and teaching the Bible. I love scripture. But loving the Bible does not mean I believe public schools should provide biblical instruction.

Certainly, students should learn about the Bible’s influence on American and world history, just as they should learn about the influence of other religions and religious texts. That is education. “Putting biblical lessons back into schools” sounds like something very different.

And before anyone signs a petition supporting that idea, perhaps we should ask exactly which biblical lessons they have in mind.

Will the curriculum include Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, where entire populations, including children, are ordered destroyed?

Will students study the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, who is thrown outside to a mob, sexually assaulted through the night, dies and is then cut into twelve pieces by the man who surrendered her?

What about Elisha cursing a group of children for teasing him, after which two bears emerge from the woods and maul forty-two of them? (That lesson might reduce hallway bullying, but it requires a warning label.)

Will students learn about Lot’s daughters getting their father drunk and having sex with him so they can become pregnant?

Then there is Exodus, where God suddenly tries to kill Moses, or possibly his son. Zipporah saves the day with a flint, an emergency circumcision and a foreskin touched to someone’s “feet.” Some scholars believe “feet” is a discreet biblical euphemism for genitals.

Try explaining that to a classroom full of seventh graders without losing them for the rest of the semester.

The Bible also contains instructions permitting slavery, the beating of enslaved people and the subjugation of women, teachings we rightly recognize today as neither just nor moral.

Now, none of this makes the Bible worthless. It just makes it complicated, and complicated doesn’t fit on a worksheet. This is not Chicken Soup for the Soul with a leather cover. Treat it like the real thing, or don’t pretend you’re teaching it at all.

More importantly: who gets to decide which lessons are taught?

A Catholic Bible includes books that a Protestant Bible omits. A Jewish reading of the Hebrew Scriptures differs sharply from a Christian one. Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals regularly disagree on basic interpretations. Will public school teachers present one group’s dogma as absolute truth, or will they also invite Muslim, Jewish, Latter-day Saint, Hindu, and secular scholars to present their perspectives?

Religious liberty cannot mean my faith gets government assistance while yours gets shown the door.

We all want our children to learn compassion, integrity, and justice. But no single faith holds a monopoly on those values, and public schools do not need to endorse a religion to teach morality.

The beauty of the First Amendment is that it keeps the government from picking a favorite faith. It allows children of every belief, and no belief, to sit in the same classroom without a single one being told that belonging requires conforming.

By all means, let’s give our kids moral instruction. But the very first lesson should be this: Religious freedom belongs to everyone, or it isn’t religious freedom at all.

Thirty miles south of where I live is one of Branson’s most popular attractions, what was once called Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede.

Then someone told Dolly that “Dixie,” with its ties to the Confederacy, was offensive.

So what did she do?

She didn’t become defensive. She didn’t complain about political correctness. She didn’t accuse anyone of erasing history or trying to cancel her.

She simply changed the name.

“There’s such a thing as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that,” she explained. “As soon as you realize that something is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass.”

There is a lot of wisdom in those words.

We don’t have to be ashamed of everything we didn’t know. But when someone helps us see what we couldn’t see before, we have a choice: defend our ignorance or learn from it.

Dolly learned from it.

She changed the name, kept the show going, and somehow the world continued to turn.

Imagine that.

We’ve been thinking about Dolly Parton today.

And one thought keeps coming back to me:

Everybody loved Dolly.

Okay, “everybody” is probably an exaggeration. There’s undoubtedly somebody somewhere who didn’t like Dolly Parton. But I’m not sure I want to meet them.

Dolly accomplished something that seems increasingly impossible in America.

She belonged to all of us.

Conservatives loved her. Progressives loved her. Christians loved her. LGBTQ+ people loved her. Country folks loved her. City folks loved her.

How did she do that?

It certainly wasn’t because she avoided having convictions.

Dolly was unapologetically Christian. She talked openly about God, prayer and faith.

But she never seemed to use her faith to exclude people.

She was also a longtime friend and advocate of the LGBTQ+ community. When criticized for it, her theology was pretty simple:

“We’re supposed to love one another. We’re supposed to not judge.”

Sounds suspiciously like Jesus.

Maybe that was part of Dolly’s secret.

She knew what she believed without needing everybody else to believe it.

She could have convictions without turning them into weapons.

She could love people without first requiring them to pass a theological, political or cultural examination.

And she could laugh at herself. The hair. The clothes. The makeup. She famously said:

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

In a country where we increasingly choose teams, and sometimes prove our loyalty by disliking everyone on the other team, Dolly somehow refused to play along.

She could be a Tennessee Christian and a gay icon.

She could sing about Jesus and support same-sex marriage.

Asked about same-sex marriage, she once quipped:

“Why can’t they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?”

Then she got to the heart of it: “Love is love.”

That was Dolly. She could say something important without sounding angry, self-righteous or condemning.

She could become one of the most recognizable people on earth and still seem like someone who might sit beside you on the porch and ask about your family.

Maybe that was one of Dolly Parton’s greatest gifts.

For decades, in an increasingly divided country, she stood somewhere in the middle of all of us and made us smile.

She brought us together.

And these days, that feels almost miraculous.

I had an unexpectedly encouraging theological conversation yesterday.

Unfortunately, I contributed very little. The woman I was talking with had both hands in my mouth.

I was at the dentist for my six-month checkup and cleaning. The hygienist was new to me. I never ask for a particular hygienist. I suppose I don’t want anyone to feel bad if I don’t pick them. I realize this may be an unnecessary level of concern for the emotional well-being of dental hygienists, but there you have it.

I took my place in the chair, leaned back, had the little bib clasped around my neck, and put on the fake Ray-Bans they give you to protect your eyes.

You know the look.

Then came one of those routine getting-to-know-you questions.

“What do you do?”

“Retired.”

“Retired from what?”

“Pastoring.”

“Ohhh. What church?”

Now that question always interests me.

When I say The Venues, I never quite know what will come next. Will they know about us? Will they be curious? Will they be uncomfortable? Will they suddenly remember that they have another patient waiting?

I’ve learned that the name of a church can tell people a lot, or at least make them think they know a lot, about you.

But she knew The Venues.

And she was good with it.

Then, as she continued cleaning my teeth, she began telling me a little of her own story.

She had grown up in a more conservative religious environment and culture. Over time, though, her thinking had changed. She had made a journey of her own toward a place of greater acceptance and affirmation.

I wanted to ask questions.

Unfortunately, this is difficult to do when someone is holding a dental mirror in one hand, a sharp metal instrument in the other, and has several fingers in your mouth.

So I listened.

And maybe that was the best thing I could have done anyway.

I listened to someone I had never met before tell me about a journey that, in some ways, sounded familiar.

It reminded me of something I occasionally forget.

We really have no idea how many people around us are quietly changing.

They’re asking questions they once thought they weren’t allowed to ask. They’re reconsidering things they were taught were settled. They’re meeting people who don’t fit the categories they inherited. They’re discovering that faith doesn’t necessarily require them to stop thinking, wondering, growing, or loving.

Most of those journeys happen without announcements.

There’s no press release.

No Facebook post saying, “I have officially reconsidered several of my deeply held assumptions.”

People just change.

Slowly. Quietly. Sometimes painfully.

And every once in a while, you discover one of those people in the most unexpected place.

Like a dentist’s office.

It was good for me to listen. Good to hear her story.

And, if I’m being truthful, good to be reminded that I’m not nearly as alone in some of my perspectives as I sometimes imagine.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of listening to other people’s stories. We discover that while our journeys are uniquely our own, we aren’t necessarily traveling by ourselves.

When we finished, I went to the desk to schedule my next six-month appointment.

She asked if I wanted to see her again or if I preferred someone else.

“You’re great,” I said.

And she is.

But there’s another reason I’ll be glad to see her again.

I want to hear the rest of her story.

Sometimes encouragement arrives when you aren’t looking for it—from someone you’ve never met, while wearing plastic Ray-Bans and with a suction tube hanging out of your mouth.

I’ll take it.

170 years ago today, a woman named Eunice Newton Foote helped us understand something we’re still arguing about.

On August 23, 1856, Foote’s scientific work was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She had conducted a remarkably simple experiment. She placed different gases in glass cylinders, put thermometers inside them, and exposed them to sunlight.

One cylinder contained carbon dioxide, then called “carbonic acid gas.”

It got hotter. And it stayed hot longer.

Foote drew a rather remarkable conclusion:

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.”

In other words, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could mean a warmer planet.

In 1856.

Before the Civil War. Before automobiles. Before anyone had ever burned a gallon of gasoline.

But here’s another part of the story that makes me go hmmm…

Eunice Foote didn’t present her own research to the scientific gathering. A man presented it for her.

Three years later, physicist John Tyndall conducted more sophisticated experiments showing how gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor absorb infrared radiation. His name became part of the history of climate science.

Hers largely disappeared.

And there’s one more interesting detail about Eunice Foote.

Eight years earlier, she had attended the Seneca Falls Convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments calling for equal rights for women.

Apparently she was interested in challenging more than one kind of atmosphere.

So today, exactly 170 years after her work was presented, here’s to Eunice Newton Foote: scientist, inventor, women’s-rights advocate, and a woman who looked at a glass cylinder in 1856 and saw something about the future.

And perhaps her story leaves us with another question:

Why, 170 years later, are we still so hesitant to accept what the science tells us—and so often hesitant to accept the people who challenge the status quo?

I heard a story today that left me with one fairly simple question:

Why can’t we just let Dorie Miller keep his ship?

In 2020, the United States Navy announced that its newest Ford-class aircraft carrier, CVN-81, would be named the USS Doris Miller.

Doris “Dorie” Miller wasn’t a president. He wasn’t an admiral. He wasn’t even an officer.

He was a mess attendant.

Miller was a Black sailor serving aboard the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the segregated Navy of that era, Black sailors were largely relegated to service positions. Miller hadn’t been trained to operate the ship’s anti-aircraft guns.

Then the Japanese attacked.

Miller helped move wounded sailors, including the ship’s captain. And then he took hold of an anti-aircraft gun and began firing at Japanese planes.

He did what needed to be done.

For his heroism, Miller became the first Black American awarded the Navy Cross. He wouldn’t survive the war. He was killed in action in 1943 at the age of 24.

Nearly eight decades later, the Navy announced that one of the most powerful warships ever built would carry his name. It was an extraordinary honor: the first aircraft carrier named for a Black American and the first named for an enlisted sailor.

And here’s an interesting detail.

That happened during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

Now comes the news that Navy officials are reportedly considering changing the name of CVN-81. One possibility being discussed is USS Donald J. Trump.

To be clear, no final decision has been announced.

But even considering it bothers me.

Not because presidents don’t get aircraft carriers named after them. They do. We have the USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS John F. Kennedy.

But naming an aircraft carrier for a sitting president would be unprecedented.

And there’s an even bigger problem for me.

This ship already has a name.

It belongs to Doris Miller.

There’s an old proverb I’ve been thinking about:

“Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips.”— Proverbs 27:2

There’s wisdom there that we’ve apparently known for a few thousand years.

Honor means something partly because we don’t give it to ourselves.

Dorie Miller didn’t ask for an aircraft carrier.

He didn’t lobby for one.

He didn’t have the power to arrange for his name to be placed on the side of one.

He certainly didn’t have much power in 1941. He served in a Navy that asked him to risk his life for his country while limiting what he was allowed to do because of the color of his skin.

And when the moment came, he served anyway.

Other people eventually looked at his life and said:

We should remember this man.

That’s honor.

There is something particularly unsettling about giving someone a seat at the table, engraving his name on it, and then asking him to get up because someone more powerful would like to sit there.

If someday Americans decide that Donald Trump deserves an aircraft carrier named for him, they can make that decision. Let history weigh his presidency. Let future leaders consider his legacy. Let someone else bestow the honor.

That’s how honor is supposed to work.

There will be other ships.

There will be other opportunities.

But Dorie Miller already has his.

Let him keep his ship.

Yesterday I was at the gym, working away on the elliptical and listening to an NPR podcast.

While I was exercising, I noticed someone walking by whom I recognized. I waved. He came over and told me he’d just had his annual physical and his doctor said everything looked good.

I congratulated him. At our age, a good annual physical is worth celebrating.

He went on to his workout.

A few minutes later, he came back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I recognize your face, but I don’t remember your name.”

Nothing keeps a retired pastor humble quite like someone you’ve known for twenty years forgetting your name.

“No worries. I get it!” I said, and told him.

Then the pieces came together.

He had been part of the last two churches I pastored. We’d known each other for a long time.

Years ago, our paths diverged when my understanding of LGBTQ inclusion and the church moved in a direction he couldn’t follow.

That happened with a number of people.

Some left quietly. Some didn’t.

There were people I loved who could no longer worship with me because of what I had come to believe. And I’m sure there were people who felt that I had left them, that I had changed the rules in the middle of the game.

Those were painful years.

But standing there in the gym yesterday, none of that came up.

Instead, he said something I wasn’t expecting.

“I’d like to talk with you over lunch.”

Then he gave me his number.

And I’ve been thinking about that invitation ever since.

I don’t know what he wants to talk about.

Maybe it’s about what happened years ago.

Maybe his thinking has changed.

Maybe mine will be challenged.

Maybe he just wants to catch up.

Maybe he just wants to talk about the Chiefs.

I don’t know.

But we’re going to have lunch.

And these days, I’m beginning to think that’s no small thing.

The other day, I ran into a friend and her young granddaughter at Walmart.

Nothing profound happened. We talked for a few minutes in the checkout line. The granddaughter proudly showed me that she and her grandmother were wearing matching shirts. I told her I liked matching shirts. Denise and I have a thing about matching hats

Later, my friend sent me a text.

She told me that after we walked away, her granddaughter asked who I was. She told her I was one of the nicest people she knew and that I had taught her a lot about Jesus. Then she added something that made me laugh, and feel more than a little uncomfortable:

She told her granddaughter that I was “kind of like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Jesus.”

That’s setting the bar dangerously high. I’m pretty sure Mr. Rogers would object, and Jesus might ask for a retraction.

But it was what the granddaughter said next that stayed with me:

“Wow. I want to be like that too.”

I’ve been thinking about those words.

Not because of what they say about me, but because of what they made me think about influence.

We are leaving impressions on people all the time, often when we have no idea anyone is paying attention.

And lately I’ve been wondering about that.

After nearly five decades of ministry, I’m retired. I no longer have a congregation waiting for me to preach on Sunday morning. I’ve wondered more than once: How do I keep helping people? How do I keep encouraging people? How do I still make a difference?

Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about platforms and not enough about checkout lines.

Maybe influence isn’t something we retire from.

Maybe it happens in grocery stores and restaurants, in conversations with strangers, in the way we treat the person behind the counter, in what we post online, in how we disagree with someone, and in the few minutes we give another human being our attention.

Which leaves me with a question I’d like to start asking myself at the end of each day:

If someone remembered me only by my actions today, what would they remember?

Was I kind?

Did I encourage someone?

Did I listen?

Did I make someone’s day a little lighter?

Did I help someone believe that they mattered?

Maybe that’s legacy—not simply what people say about us when our lives are over, but the little pieces of ourselves we leave behind every single day.

And maybe retirement doesn’t mean my opportunity to influence people is getting smaller.

Maybe it just means I’m learning to look for it in different places.

Even Walmart

The other day, I ran into a friend and her young granddaughter at Walmart.

Nothing profound happened. We talked for a few minutes in the checkout line. The granddaughter proudly showed me that she and her grandmother were wearing matching shirts. I told her I liked matching shirts. Denise and I have a thing about matching hats

Later, my friend sent me a text.

She told me that after we walked away, her granddaughter asked who I was. She told her I was one of the nicest people she knew and that I had taught her a lot about Jesus. Then she added something that made me laugh, and feel more than a little uncomfortable:

She told Paisley I was “kind of like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Jesus.”

That’s setting the bar dangerously high. I’m pretty sure Mr. Rogers would object, and Jesus might ask for a retraction.

But it was what Paisley said next that stayed with me:

“Wow. I want to be like that too.”

I’ve been thinking about those words.

Not because of what they say about me, but because of what they made me think about influence.

We are leaving impressions on people all the time, often when we have no idea anyone is paying attention.

And lately I’ve been wondering about that.

After nearly five decades of ministry, I’m retired. I no longer have a congregation waiting for me to preach on Sunday morning. I’ve wondered more than once: How do I keep helping people? How do I keep encouraging people? How do I still make a difference?

Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about platforms and not enough about checkout lines.

Maybe influence isn’t something we retire from.

Maybe it happens in grocery stores and restaurants, in conversations with strangers, in the way we treat the person behind the counter, in what we post online, in how we disagree with someone, and in the few minutes we give another human being our attention.

Which leaves me with a question I’d like to start asking myself at the end of each day:

If someone remembered me only by my actions today, what would they remember?

Was I kind?

Did I encourage someone?

Did I listen?

Did I make someone’s day a little lighter?

Did I help someone believe that they mattered?

Maybe that’s legacy—not simply what people say about us when our lives are over, but the little pieces of ourselves we leave behind every single day.

And maybe retirement doesn’t mean my opportunity to influence people is getting smaller.

Maybe it just means I’m learning to look for it in different places.

Even Walmart.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Confederate soldier still standing on a pedestal in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Today, I heard a rebroadcast of Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interview with poet and author Clint Smith that made me think about that statue again—but from a different perspective.

Smith grew up in New Orleans surrounded by Confederate monuments. As a child, he didn’t think much about them. They were simply part of the landscape.

Then he learned to see them differently.

In his poem “Ode to the Confederate Memorial,” Smith writes:

“It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.”

That line stayed with me.

Smith talks about Black children playing beneath statues of white men who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved. He talks about walking into buildings named for people who would never have wanted him there and driving on streets named for men who would have wanted him in chains.

And I realized something.

I could afford not to notice.

For much of my life, Confederate monuments could simply be “history” to me. The men on those pedestals weren’t fighting to keep people who looked like me enslaved. A Confederate flag didn’t suggest that my ancestors were property. A building named for a segregationist never made me wonder whether someone like me belonged inside.

What was scenery to me could carry an entirely different message to someone else.

That’s one reason listening to other people’s stories matters.

They help us see what has always been there.

They don’t erase history.

They reveal more of it.

Perhaps that’s a question worth asking ourselves—not only about Confederate monuments, but about a lot of things:

What have I been able not to notice because it didn’t affect me?

And whose story might help me see it differently?

Sometimes we encounter an idea only when we’re finally ready to see what it has been trying to show us.

And once we learn to see something, it’s hard to unsee it.

I think that’s a good thing

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I’ll confess: most mornings my phone serves me two golf swings, a ’60s song, and a newsroom blooper reel before it gets around to anything that actually makes me stop.

So it takes something to stop the scroll of a man my age.

Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina managed it recently.

My response was theological in nature:

“Say what?!”

Days after Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim, won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Mace posted:

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

Not “some.” Not “those whose policies I oppose.”

Not “those associated with a particular extremist organization.”

Every single Muslim.

She went further, arguing that Islam needs to be “removed from civil society” in America.

And she is hardly alone.

Senator Tommy Tuberville called El-Sayed a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” and a “TERRORIST.” The Senate Leadership Fund warned he would “unleash terror.” Senator Ted Cruz lumped El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani together as “Islamists” who want Sharia law and hate Jews, Christians, capitalism and America.

There is a word for this: Islamophobia.

But before this becomes another argument about Republicans and Democrats, I want to go somewhere deeper.

This is about how we see. “Trojan horse” is a peculiar accusation.

It doesn’t say your policies are wrong. It doesn’t say you cast a bad vote. It doesn’t even say you’ve done something dangerous.

It says your presence is dangerous.

You may be a citizen, born here, elected by your neighbors. You may be a physician, a teacher, a mayor, a senator.

But underneath all of that, the accusation says: You aren’t really one of us.

We’ve seen this before.

We said it about Catholics, that they answered to Rome before they answered to America, that a Catholic president would take his orders from the Pope.

We said it about Japanese Americans. Some 70,000 of those incarcerated during World War II were U.S. citizens, yet we decided their ancestry made them suspicious enough to put behind barbed wire.

Different people. Different decades. Same way of seeing.

Your loyalty is a lie. You may live among us, but you aren’t really one of us.

That’s how prejudice works.

First we notice a difference. Then we attach a story to the difference. Eventually the story becomes the person. We take millions of unique human beings and reduce them to a category:

Muslim.

Then we decide what the category means.

Dangerous. Foreign. Radical. Un-American.

And eventually we stop seeing Abdul or Zohran or Ahmed or Fatima. We see only “Muslim.”

That should trouble Christians in particular.

Jesus spent an extraordinary amount of his time crossing boundaries his culture had drawn between people. Samaritan. Woman. Leper. Tax collector. Roman.

Those words came with stories already attached—assumptions about who belonged, who could be trusted, who should be feared, who was on the right side of God.

Jesus kept challenging those assumptions.

He didn’t simply ask people to be kinder to those they had already decided were suspect. He challenged the very idea that they should have been viewed with suspicion in the first place.

Again and again, Jesus invited people to question the stories they had been taught about their neighbors.

That’s the challenge before us now. Not to say, “Muslims may be different, but we should love them anyway.” That still leaves the prejudice intact.

The deeper question is why the word “Muslim” should make us suspicious in the first place.

Why should someone’s faith cause us to question their loyalty, their character or their place among us?

Six days after September 11, 2001—smoke still rising, Americans understandably terrified and angry—President George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center of Washington.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said.

He reminded the country that Muslims were our doctors, lawyers, professors, members of the military, shopkeepers, moms and dads.

They were our neighbors. And they deserved respect.

Think about that moment. If ever there were a time when demonizing Muslims would have been politically easy, that was it.

Bush didn’t take it. We’ve traveled a long way from that moment.

The question is whether we want to keep traveling in this direction.

Forty-seven years in ministry, and I still find myself needing a dead German theologian to remind me how to see my neighbor.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew what happens when a society learns to see whole groups of people as threats rather than neighbors.

Writing during the Nazi era, he confessed: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds.”

But he also insisted that we learn to see history “from below”—from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the powerless, the reviled. In other words:

Try standing somewhere else before deciding what you see.

What does America look like to a Muslim child who hears a member of Congress say every Muslim public official is a threat?

What does religious freedom sound like to a Muslim American when an elected official says their faith should be “removed from civil society”?

What does “liberty and justice for all” feel like when you begin wondering whether all includes you?

Richard Rohr says spiritual transformation doesn’t just change what we see.

It changes how we see.

The mystic, he says, learns to look through eyes capable of seeing grace and connection where others see only separation.

I’ve been at this a long time. I’m still working on the eyes.

Maybe that’s the spiritual discipline we need right now. Not learning what to think about Muslims.

Learning how to see our Muslim neighbors.

Not as a voting bloc. Not as a threat. Not as representatives of everything anyone who shares their religion has ever said or done.

As people. Because labels make life easier.

Once I’ve labeled you, I don’t have to know you.

Once I’ve decided what “your kind” is like, I don’t have to listen to your story.

Once you become “them,” I no longer have to recognize you as “us.”

But the work of becoming more fully human—and, for those of us who follow Jesus, more Christlike—is exactly the opposite.

We keep looking until the label no longer hides the person.

Maybe that’s what Jesus was doing all along.

Teaching people to see.

Because once we truly see our neighbor, it becomes much harder to call them a Trojan horse.

Random Thought: Before deciding what someone is, get close enough to see who they are.

Last weekend, Denise and I spent a night in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We walked Bathhouse Row, drank some of that famous hot spring water (and, in the interest of thorough research, some that had been turned into beer), and did the things tourists do.

Then I saw a Confederate soldier standing on a pedestal in the middle of downtown.

I stopped. Seriously? In 2026?

I know what some of you are already thinking: here we go, somebody wants to erase history. Actually, no. I want us to tell more of it. So I started reading.

The monument was erected in 1934 by the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Civil War ended in 1865. Nobody hurried home from Appomattox and said, “We need to build a statue.” They waited 69 years, until slavery was gone but Jim Crow was very much alive, when Black Americans throughout the South were denied the vote, segregated by law and custom, and terrorized by lynching.

And in Hot Springs, they put a Confederate soldier on a pedestal.

The story gets worse. The triangle of land where the monument stands had previously been the site of two lynchings — Will Norman in 1913, and Gilbert Harris in 1922, seized from jail by a mob before he could stand trial. Twelve years later, the Confederate monument went up on that same triangle.

Then something stranger: in 1953, the City of Hot Springs deeded the land beneath the monument to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They still own it. In 2020, when the city manager supported relocating the statue, the UDC reportedly wouldn’t even meet to discuss it.

Which left me with a question: who gets to decide what a city honors? The UDC doesn’t govern Hot Springs. The citizens do. Or at least I thought they did.

I understand private property and Arkansas law make this more complicated than sending over a crane on Monday morning. But complicated can’t become another word for forever. At some point, shouldn’t a community get to reconsider what occupies its most prominent public square?

And before somebody says it again, no, I don’t want to erase history. I want to tell it. All of it. Put the statue in a museum. Tell us who erected it, and why, and why they waited until 1934. Tell us about Jim Crow. Tell us about Will Norman and Gilbert Harris. And while we’re at it, tell us what the Confederacy’s leaders actually said they were defending — because we don’t have to speculate.

Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, explained it plainly in his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech”: the Confederacy was founded on the belief that Black people were inherently unequal, and that slavery was their natural condition. Jefferson Davis, speaking in the U.S. Senate in 1860, said much the same — that inferiority had been “stamped upon that race of men by the Creator.” Those aren’t words twenty-first-century liberals imposed on nineteenth-century Southerners. Those are their own words.

Which makes me wonder about something we hear whenever these monuments come up: “We’re honoring our heritage.” Okay. Which part? Heritage isn’t automatically honorable. Every family, every church, every nation has a past worth remembering that isn’t worth celebrating. Maturity isn’t pretending it didn’t happen. Maturity is saying: that’s part of our story, and it was wrong.

Maybe we’ve confused two different things. History remembers. Pedestals honor. A museum, a history book, a classroom — those remember. But putting someone high above the street asks people to look up. And I’m no longer sure why anyone should have to look up to a cause built on the belief that some human beings were created inferior to others.

Howard Thurman — the Black theologian and mystic whose thinking profoundly shaped Martin Luther King Jr. — offered a different vision. In 1955 he said human rights don’t depend on race, class, or social standing; they belong to a person “as a child of God.” When liberty is reserved for one group and denied to another, Thurman called it a “cult of inequality.”

Stephens said some people are inherently inferior. Davis said God made them that way. Thurman said every human being has dignity because every human being is a child of God. Those aren’t competing political opinions. They’re competing visions of what it means to be human. And I know which one I want on the pedestal.

I’m not suggesting a statue’s removal fixes racism — if only it were that easy. White supremacy doesn’t disappear when a crane arrives. But symbols matter. That’s exactly why the UDC wanted this one prominently displayed in the first place. They understood what we sometimes pretend not to: what we put in prominent places says something about what we value.

So maybe the real question isn’t about an old statue in Hot Springs. Maybe it’s about us. What do we do when we discover that something our ancestors celebrated doesn’t deserve our celebration? Can we love where we came from without defending everything that happened there?

I think we can. I think that’s what growing up looks like.

Hot Springs doesn’t need to forget the Confederate soldier. Tell his story, and the UDC’s story, and please, tell Will Norman’s and Gilbert Harris’s stories too. But after ninety-two years, maybe it’s time for that soldier to come down from the pedestal. Not because we’re ashamed of history. Because we’ve learned from it.

Removing a monument doesn’t erase the past. It simply stops asking us to look up to it, and maybe that’s one small step toward the world Howard Thurman imagined, where dignity belongs to all of us, because we are all children of God.

I thought it was satire.

Surely The Onion had dreamed this one up.

But no. Justin Park, an Iowa native, computer scientist and entrepreneur, has founded something called the Cross on the Moon Coalition. And their goal is exactly what the name suggests:

They want to put a cross on the moon. Not metaphorically. An actual cross.

Park told The Catholic Messenger that he believes humans may be living in space within a generation or two, and Christians need to “get out in front of this” and lead with Christian values.

His rationale? “Putting a cross on the moon kind of sanctifies the lunar surface.”

Sanctifies the lunar surface? I have questions.

Mostly this one: What makes us think the moon needs our help being holy?

The moon has been hanging there for about 4.5 billion years. Long before Christianity. Long before Judaism. Long before anybody wrote Genesis, built a church, preached a sermon, or decided where a cross ought to go.

And according to the very Bible this project hopes to honor, creation was declaring the glory of God long before Christians arrived to put their logo on it.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

Apparently the heavens have been doing fine without our signage.

Maybe this story struck me because I live in the Missouri Ozarks, where we already know something about really big crosses.

Drive south from Springfield toward Branson on Highway 65 and you can’t miss one.

It’s 218 feet tall. Two hundred and eighteen feet of cross.

And whenever I drive by it, I can’t help wondering whether somewhere along the way we Christians began to think:

They’ll know we are Christians by the size of our cross.

Which, as I recall, is not quite how the song goes.

“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Love.

Not our monuments. Not our buildings. Not our billboards.

Not our ability to erect the largest religious symbol in the neighborhood—or, apparently, the solar system.

Rome used the cross to announce its power. It’s worth asking whether Christianity sometimes does the same thing. Maybe the most faithful response to the cross isn’t to make it 218 feet tall—or send it 240,000 miles into space.

He hung on one.

And then he told his followers what their lives should look like.

Feed the hungry.

Welcome the stranger.

Care for the sick.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemy.

Forgive.

Show mercy.

Seek justice.

Take care of the least of these.

Maybe the world doesn’t need a bigger cross.

Maybe it needs more people who live like the man who died on one.

But a symbol is only as meaningful as the life it points toward.

A 218-foot cross without love is just 218 feet of steel.

And an eight-foot cross on the moon without compassion on Earth is just a very expensive piece of metal a quarter-million miles away.

Perhaps instead of asking how we can sanctify the moon, Christianity might ask how we can recognize the sacredness already around us.

In the immigrant.

In the hungry child.

In the lonely neighbor.

In the person whose politics we despise.

In the LGBTQ kid wondering whether there is a place for them.

In the person sleeping in a car.

In the earth beneath our feet.

And yes, in the moon above our heads.

Maybe sacredness isn’t something Christians carry into places that aren’t sacred yet.

Maybe our calling is to recognize that God got there first.

So go ahead and look at the moon tonight.

I think it’s already holy. No construction project required.

Tonight, I heard two very different ways of talking about war.

President Trump, speaking to Fox News about Iran, said:

“We’re going to beat the fucking shit out of them.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has used words like lethality, epic fury, and overwhelming violence of action. He has described American troops as “warriors, trained to kill the enemy and break their will.”

Hegseth has also said something I think we can all agree on:

“War is hell.”

Then I heard a child describe what hell looks like.

At Pope Leo’s “Concert for Peace” with Andrea Bocelli, children from places gripped by war and crisis gathered to sing. Their voices carried more than music. They carried stories.

One young girl prayed:

“Father, we are children. And we only ask not to be afraid of the dark. War is a dark night that takes away our friends, our parents, our schools, and our homes.”

I haven’t been able to get those words out of my mind.

Powerful adults talk about epic fury.

A child talks about losing her parents.

Powerful adults talk about lethality.

A child talks about losing her friends.

A president talks about beating the fucking shit out of them.

A child asks not to be afraid of the dark.

I understand that the world is complicated. There are aggressors. There are innocent people who need defending. There may be times when those entrusted with protecting others conclude that force is necessary.

But God help us if we ever become eager for it.

God help us if we can talk casually, even enthusiastically, about beating the shit out of them without remembering that somewhere among them is a child.

A child with friends.

A child with parents.

A child with a school.

A child with a home.

A child who would like the darkness to be nothing more frightening than bedtime.

Before the bombs fall, before the missiles fly, before we cheer promises of fury from the safety of our living rooms, perhaps we should listen to those who know what war actually looks like.

“War is a dark night.”

The powerful decide when wars begin.

Children tell us what they cost.

I recently listened to an episode of The Opinions, a New York Times podcast, titled, “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be On to Something.”

Well, there’s a headline I didn’t see coming. I grew up as a baby boomer in the evangelical church. We heard a lot about sex. Mostly, we heard one thing:

Don’t.

Don’t do it. Don’t think about doing it. Don’t get too close to doing it.

Sex before marriage was one of the big sins. You could be greedy, arrogant, judgmental, or indifferent to the poor and somehow avoid a Wednesday night youth-group lesson about it.

But sex? We had entire conferences.

And now, after decades of churches telling young people not to have sex, apparently young people aren’t having sex. And we’re worried about it. You can’t make this stuff up.

It’s being called the “sex recession.”

Multiple studies suggest that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. Researchers point to loneliness, more time online, anxiety, political differences, and the social effects of COVID.

And apparently Gen Z really likes sleep.

A sex recession? At 70, I assumed my generation would be leading that particular economic downturn. But one explanation especially caught my attention: a declining tolerance for the messy and awkward parts of relationships.

The uncomfortable conversation. The bad first date. The awkward silence. The kiss that doesn’t go quite as planned. We live in a world increasingly designed to eliminate that kind of friction.

Don’t like the movie? Click another one.

Don’t like the song? Skip it.

Don’t like the person?

Swipe.

But you can’t swipe your way to intimacy. And maybe that’s what this is really about. We have never been more connected. And loneliness is everywhere. The sexual revolution liberated people from some deeply harmful shame. That’s good. But removing shame from sex didn’t necessarily give us intimacy. It turns out you can be sexually free and still be terribly lonely.

And you can live a deeply connected, meaningful life without having sex at all.

Christianity has often been terrible at talking about sex. But at its center is a beautiful idea:

Incarnation.

The Word became flesh. God didn’t send a text. God showed up. In a body.

Maybe the question isn’t whether Gen Z is having enough sex. Maybe it’s whether any of us are experiencing enough intimacy.

Enough friendship. Enough touch. Enough presence.

Enough places where we can be awkward and unfinished and still be loved.

Perhaps that’s the spiritual invitation for all of us: Put down the phone. Look someone in the eyes. Stay through the awkward silence. Show up.

In person. In a body. Fully present. And, apparently, well rested

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This afternoon, we had an HVAC technician come to the house.

We’ve been having some humidity issues, so we made an appointment to talk about installing a whole-house dehumidifier.

He looked things over. Took some measurements. Explained the product. Gave us a price.

It was more than we wanted to pay, so we thanked him and began walking him to the door

Before he left, he asked me:

“Do you go to church?”

And I thought, Oh my goodness. Is this really happening?

I answered with complete honesty:

“No, we don’t.”

As soon as I said it, I realized something.

That may have been the first time in my entire life I could truthfully give that answer.

I grew up in church. My father was a pastor. I became a pastor. I spent 47 years in ministry.

And now, apparently, I was the mission field.

He proceeded to tell us about his church and his pastor. Then he handed us a brochure that explained our problem.

And here I thought our problem was humidity.

Turns out, it was considerably worse.

According to the brochure, we are sinners on the road to hell. Fortunately, there is a solution. Say the prayer printed in the brochure, ask Jesus into your heart, and you can go to heaven when you die.

I had called about a dehumidifier.

I left with a plan of salvation.

I suppose that’s what you call comprehensive home service.

Now, I don’t want to criticize the man. He was kind. He was sincere. I have no doubt that he believed he was doing something loving. In his understanding of the world, our eternal destiny was at stake. If you genuinely believe someone is headed toward eternal torment, warning them probably feels like the most loving thing you can do.

So this isn’t really about him.

It’s about the story he—and millions of Christians—has been given.

And for the first time in my life, I experienced that story from the other side.

I wasn’t a pastor.

I wasn’t the person with the microphone.

I wasn’t the one explaining Jesus.I was the “unchurched” person who needed to be saved.

And I found myself wondering: Is this really what following Jesus is about?

After all these years, have we reduced the life and teachings of Jesus to a formula for where people go when they die?

You’re a sinner.
You’re headed to hell.
Jesus died to make another destination possible.
Say this prayer.
Go to heaven.

Is that the gospel? Because when I read the stories of Jesus, I see something far more expansive.

I see Jesus feeding hungry people. Touching people others wouldn’t touch. Welcoming people religion had pushed aside. Challenging systems that burdened people.

Forgiving people before they ever got their theology straight or even before he died on the cross.

Inviting people to love their neighbors—and even their enemies.

Talking about a kingdom that was already among us.

Maybe the question Jesus is asking isn’t simply, “Where will you go when you die?”

Maybe the question is: “What kind of human being are you becoming while you’re alive?”

Maybe following Jesus is less about getting people to say the right prayer and more about learning to love the person standing in front of us.

Less about escaping this world. More about healing it.

Less about securing heaven later.

More about participating in the kingdom of God now.

I don’t know everything I once thought I knew about God. But after 47 years in ministry, I still find Jesus compelling. Maybe more than ever.

I’m just not convinced he came to sell us fire insurance.

Speaking of which...We still have a humidity problem.

Apparently, that’s the least of our worries

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