This may be the coolest restaurant on earth.

This morning I had green pepper cheese grits with eggs over easy and fried potatoes. It wasn’t the healthiest meal I’ve ever eaten, but it was worth it—pure culinary heaven. My two sons, Luke and Sean, and my wife, Harriet, had “Tim’s Favorite,” pancakes with blueberries and bananas. They loved it. “Tim’s Favorite” is named…

Baseball and the Body of Christ

Leo Durocher once wrote, “Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.” I would add that baseball, like church, involves a community that you have to be a part of in order to gain understanding. To appreciate the beauty of the game of baseball, you have to learn to sit with it. You have to…

The Social Justice Issue the UMC Doesn’t Want to Deal With

Imagine that there was a pre-natal test, commonly recommended by medical personnel, to identify children who would experience depression throughout their lives. Upon receiving a positive test, parents were counseled: You know, you might not want to go through with this pregnancy.  You’re headed down a very difficult path. You may very well see your…

Why Churchgoers Must (Really) Change

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2…

The Disabled God and other reflections

  The corporeal is for people with disabilities the most real. Unwilling and unable to take our bodies for granted, we attend to the kinesis of knowledge. That is, we become keenly aware that our physical selves determine our perceptions of the social and physical world. These perceptions, like our bodies, are often nonconforming and disclose new categories and models of thinking…

Stigmatization and the Church

At a church-related conference, I heard a presentation on the matter of stigmatization as it relates to people with disabilities. The primary point of the presentation was that we tend to internalize negative perceptions by others, and thereby allow them to control our self-esteem and consequently our behavior. All true enough….Nevertheless, when it comes to…