Risking the Terror: Resurrection in this Life
Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001

“Teaching the basic preaching course year after year after year remains one of my greatest passions and a source of great joy. To watch new preachers as they come to understand the great power and hope of the proclaimed word in people’s lives, and to hear their voices become more artistic and more faithful on behalf of the claims of God’s justice in the world, is unspeakably holy.”

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“In recent years the commitments that I have always had to cross cultural immersion education have been ignited anew. To build community with students as we travel to other parts of the world, and out of our familiar comfortable lives, is a rare learning experience. To seek to connect with people in Northern New Mexico, Guatemala, and Chiapas, Mexico, across lines of class, ethnicity, and culture, and to let their voices and their struggles for justice change us, is a transformative learning experience that is unlike any other.”

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“I would hope that preachers who are trained at United Theological Seminary would reflect in their ministries in the world - and in their prophetic preaching - an uncompromising commitment to justice for all God’s creation. That they would know in their hearts and souls that to be pastoral is to be prophetic, and to be prophetic is to be profoundly pastoral.”

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“There are several concerns that inform my professional and personal life and create in me a sense of passionate faith. I am concerned about the centrality of a sacramental understanding of life in which we are called to discern and proclaim how the spirit moves and breathes through all of life. I am committed to the church as that which is called to create and sustain communities of radical love and justice. I am concerned about urban and rural renewal. I am committed to forging a relationship between theology and the arts. I am concerned about the relentless work of weaving together individual spiritual formation with global acts of justice and transformation.”

“I have always believed that the church could be a redemptive, transformative body of people working for a world where all creation would share in God’s abundant life. This means that the church as God’s people in the world would not stop our work of resistance and hope until all people experience dignity and justice, and the larger creation has ceased to be constantly violated and exploited.

“I am interested in talking with people who are trying to think through some of the most difficult and challenging issues of our day, including global economic justice, the flourishing of the earth and its creatures, immigration issues, and what it means to build solidarity with oppressed people in the two thirds world.”