Reflections, thoughts and events BCM and friends.
Friends: Much of our attention has rightly been focused on ICE assaults in Minneapolis, as well as the amazing popular resistance there (including faith communities and many of our friends there, such as folks at Calvary Baptist Church, right). Please continue to pray and protest, that we might keep building momentum into a turning point…
PODCASTS: Our friend Ragan Sutterfeld just released an hour-long interview he did late last year with the Ekklesia Project about the Bible, Christian Zionism and the war on Palestine. He talks with Ched and our Canadian colleague Sylvia Keesmaat (right). Check it out here. We’re getting to know young Sabeel activist theologian Thanh Nguyen; Ched…
Feast of Epiphany (January 6th, 2026) Thirty years ago, my then-young Jewish godson dubbed the Christmas season “the days of craze.” He wasn’t wrong: the consumer-industrial complex’s relentless seductive-compulsive huckstering drives us crazy by effectively drowning out the good (if subversive) news of Mary’s Magnificat and angelic pronouncements that God’s sovereignty trumps empire. Sadly, the…
 Last Friday was the Feast of La Virgen de Guadalupe. At right is a retablo, a hybrid style of indigenous artistry, centuries of Catholic iconography, and Spanish culture. Retablos are small oil paintings on tin, zinc, wood, or copper which were used in home altars to honor saints.  This one has hung in our…
Last Sunday after Pentecost, 2025 This Sunday is the last one in Year C; after this (and after Thanksgiving) comes the first Sunday in Advent for Year A. It’s been fun (if challenging) to blog weekly from texts and themes in HARP; starting next week we’ll return to blogging twice a month. We hope you…
23rd Sunday after Pentecost – Lk 20:45-21:36 I am tardy for this last in my series of blogs on Luke and HARP during this lectionary Year C. I was scrambling to shape this material for a Center & Library for the Bible and Social Justice webinar last night with Chuck Collins (right), a stimulating conversation…
22nd Week after Pentecost, 2025 As we near the end of lectionary Year C and our journey through Luke, we are happy to announce that the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice will host a conversation between Chuck Collins’ and me on Thursday, Nov 13, from 7:30-9 pm EST. Chuck’s Burned by…
Lk 18:35-19:28: 21st Sunday after Pentecost Jesus concluded the twinned teaching of Lk 18:1-14 (the last two Sunday’s readings) by reiterating his pronouncement from 14:11: “The exalted will be brought down, and the humbled lifted up” (18:14b). This both looks back to Mary’s Magnificat (1:52), and forward to this Sunday’s gospel: the story of Zacchaeus…
And Honoring Two Departed Saints; 20th Sunday after Pentecost, 2025 The parable that follows the Persistent Woman and the Unjust Judge similarly indicts elites (Lk 18:9–14), this time targeting those who justify their privilege with religious presumption and disguise their predatory power with public piety. It thus strikes closer to home for those of us…
I love how this parable disrupts our still heavily male-focused culture by celebrating and centering the agency of women—thus my subtitle “Hersistence”! There is so much in which to delight in this story of the tenacious prayer and public resistance of this unnamed protagonist, who is truly a great ancestor of women’s personal and political…