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Meat

By Julia Walsh, FSPANovember 28, 2019

When I subjected my body to limits beyond what felt reasonable, I discovered that faith is embodied, that its strength can be expressed in the movement of muscle.

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Truly, a Eucharist

By Caroline LangstonJuly 3, 2019

Years ago, I was riding around the ragged edges of a Washington, D.C., suburb with my brother-in-law, who’s retired now, but who was a real-estate appraiser. We were on a street of modest, slightly-crumbling brick colonials, not unlike the one in which I would eventually live. “Oh, those,” he said, gesturing his arm out the…

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The Gospel Is a Story of Meals

By John HawbakerMay 22, 2019

“The book of Genesis opens in a garden,” Kendall Vanderslice writes in We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship and the Community of God. As a child, she spent afternoons with a friend making “concoctions” and learning to bake bread. Later, she says, “that developed into an interest in the Eucharist.” Vanderslice became a baker, earned…

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Poetry Friday: “Wonder Bread”

By Jeanine HathawayMay 17, 2019

One teasing April day the mad priestapproached a bakery truck and prayedIf that priest is still loosechanging substantially everything he knows how,what if no one overhears? Upon first reading the poem “Wonder Bread,” I remembered a 2010 mock commercial for “Pre-Blessed Food.” It wasn’t filmed and posted to YouTube until eleven years after “Wonder Bread” was published in Image, but it was a cultural cornerstone when I was in middle school. Peers at the…

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On Poetry, Faith and Grief

By Katherine Willis PersheyMay 6, 2019

Last spring I promised my congregation a sermon about “words and the Word.” That was my clever title for a sermon that was a long time coming. My sermons tend to take a long time to marinate. I can pinpoint precisely when I started working on that one. I was nineteen, and deeply committed to…

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Grace and The Good Place

By Bryan BlissFebruary 15, 2018

In my first church job, I rarely had to serve communion so, every month I’d get a few moments to remember what church was like before I had come on staff. In The United Methodist Church, the way we celebrate communion is fairly standardized. I’ve heard arguments that this standardization (read: boring; unwilling to change)…

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Poetry Friday: “More Strange”

By Kristin George BagdanovAugust 12, 2016

This poem coaxes me to inhabit a story I’ve heard many times, and makes it astonishingly new, summoning me with the urgency of the second-person perspective and the half-answered question of the title. It’s a poem that asks a lot of its reader—nothing less than to experience a mother’s grief at the loss of her…

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Poetry Friday: “For Whom the Resurrection Is the Full Moon Rising”

By Mark WagenaarJuly 1, 2016

This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to a cosmic event: a “moondog,” which is a rare bright spot in the moon’s halo. It’s formed by a “mirage of light & cloud & ice”—an image which then brings the speaker down to earth, into his own life. But…

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Thin Places, Part One

By Alissa WilkinsonMay 9, 2016

  A few summers ago, my husband Tom and I were in Dublin for a week, and one day, we took a tour bus to two ancient holy places—thin places, the Celts would have called them: spots where heaven and earth are very close to one another, where the ordinary distance between the two collapses.…

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The Holy Wafer on the Floor

By Morgan MeisSeptember 23, 2015

Sometimes I take the Host in the mouth, other times I take it in the hand. Mostly I take it in the mouth. That’s because of the strangeness of it, the good strangeness. I don’t generally let other people feed me, let alone grown men. Let alone priests. So, this meal is not like other…

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