When I was newly ordained, I struggled for sometime trying to construct a prayer life that was as satisfying as the one I had while I was a seminarian. Being part of an organized community that read the Daily Office daily made it easy to look after my prayer life. But when I was out on my own, I found it was much harder to set aside the time – and it was a different […]
I’ve always found the last two verses of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” to be some of the most arresting imagery found in Christmas carol. And that’s true evenmore so this year than in past ones. Yet with the woes of sin and strife The World has suffered long; Beneath the angel-strain have rolled Two thousan years of wrong; And man, at war with man, hears not The love-song that they bring: O hush […]
This morning I joined my sisters and brothers of Rhode Island’s faith and civic communities at The Rhode Island Council for Muslim Advancement for a press conference in Support of Rhode Island’s Muslim Community. Below are the words I shared at the event. The framers of the Bill of Rights knew the danger of giving a government the power to control how citizens were allowed to think and worship. They remembered the hundreds of years of […]
The Episcopal Church has been resettling refugees for over 75 years and we will be active in welcoming Syrian refugees to America. It is wrong to discriminate against those fleeing violence, oppression or certain death merely because of where they come from or because of their religion. In the Book of Leviticus, God says to the people of Israel that, “the foreigner who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; […]
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry posted this video tonight calling on all Episcopalians to pray for our sisters and brothers in Paris:
Umar Hague argues convincingly that social media has not fulfilled its promise because it has allowed a culture of abuse to flourish. And that has driven people away – abuse turned Facebook into something it didn’t start out to be and abuse is threatening to end Twitter. He ends the essay thus, calling for companies to focus on the abuse of others at least as much as they focus on serving up advertisements: Can we create […]
A rabbi once told me that God hides the truth from us and expects us to use our minds, the reason that God gifted us at our birth to uncover the truth. I find it fascinating that we have this itch in us to make sense of what is probably, ultimately, unsensible. It’s the pilgrimage, it’s the struggle to understand, that transforms us. It’s not the answer. More here.
The series of blog posts that I wrote for the Diocese of Rhode Island during Lent of 2013 is now edited, tightened up and in print from Leader Resources. (Some folks in congregations said that they would prefer to use them in a book form rather than online.) From the book’s page on the publisher’s site: Bishop Knisely invites you to on a journey through the Gospel of Luke and the Books of Acts. Journey to […]
May the Christ Child be fully present to you in this season of Christmas, and may you and your family be blessed in the coming year.
Yesterday, as three groups of the House of Bishops went to visit churches, museums and cultural centers around Taiwan, I found myself thinking about the challenges of proclaiming the eternal Gospel to people whose thinking is organized in radically different ways than that of the West. It’s not a new problem. The early missionaries of the Church struggled with explaining the Hebrew roots of Christianity to people of the Hellenistic culture. Missionaries who traveled East […]
