I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the late, great Black feminist thinker Audre Lorde’s words, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” It was a warning to marginalized communities against co-opting the tactics the powerful have used against them, for that only serves to perpetuate the cycle of injustice rather than to … Continue reading The Master’s Tools: A Reflection for Tuesday in Holy Week
The focus of Monday in Holy Week is a quiet story of Jesus spending time in Bethany with his friends Lazarus, Mary, and Martha before he enters Jerusalem (John 12.1-11). It’s a story with a surprisingly large cast of characters, all with different motivations for showing up and for responding as they do. It’s worth … Continue reading Who Am I, Today? A Reflection for Monday in Holy Week 2023
One of the fascinating things about how the first Christians understood what had happened in the world in and through Jesus is just how topsy-turvy, unexpected, and ironic it all was. As they read their Scriptures, they suddenly saw Jesus everywhere in them, even if this caused them to read those Scriptures from a different … Continue reading Palms and Crosses: A Reflection for Palm Sunday 2023
As we saw in yesterday’s post, when her visions were over, Julian of Norwich was left wondering two things: how she was supposed to respond to it, and what it all meant. We looked at the first of these questions yesterday, and saw that the message was just like that of the Scriptures’ summaries of … Continue reading Love is the Meaning of it All
The most basic religious question of all is what it is God wants from us. The Scriptures’ answers to this question were the major focus of the Sunday readings during the season of Epiphany this year, inspiring reflections here on receiving the summons, on the various summaries of the Law from Deuteronomy, Micah, Ecclesiastes and … Continue reading The Light of Love, or How to Please God
Matthew Root 