There was a clip circulating online yesterday that was hard to watch, a short exchange between Billy Eichner and Colton Underwood, the former Bachelor contestant who came out as gay. It’s a cameo Billy made during Colton's season, a season that had portrayed Colton with a kind of naivety it connected explicitly to his Christian… Continue reading This and that
Category: Faith
Holy Saturday & Easter Sunday ’21
My church has been meeting remotely (via YouTube, along with other real-time gatherings throughout the week) the entire duration of the pandemic in the U.S. The first few months of "Couch Church," most Sundays I'd set up my laptop, make a big breakfast, settle into the sofa with anticipation, and then...immediately feel a kind of… Continue reading Holy Saturday & Easter Sunday ’21
Good Friday ’21
Is it just me, or has this Holy Week felt especially long? Maybe it's how badly we need good news, maybe it's the monotony of pandemic life, maybe it's the bizarre way so many of us seem to be experiencing time right now; but the gap between Maundy Thursday and Easter Vigil has felt like… Continue reading Good Friday ’21
Maundy Thursday ’21
It's my favorite service of the year, insofar as "favorite" isn't synonymous with "most pleasurable." Maundy Thursday allows us to encounter Christ in specific emotions that rarely get room to breathe in the life of the church the rest of the year: the awkward and embarrassing intimacy of having your bare feet touched by a… Continue reading Maundy Thursday ’21
The labyrinth at St. James Cathedral
On Saturday I walked the labyrinth at St. James Cathedral in downtown Chicago. If I remember correctly, it was a campus minister who introduced me to labyrinths—in that case, a simple path made of rope and traffic cones on a weekend retreat—and since then they’ve occupied a place in my spirit somewhere in between a… Continue reading The labyrinth at St. James Cathedral
“What God Has Entrusted to Us”
A sermon delivered to LaSalle Street Church on 3/21/21, revised for reading. You can watch the full service here, or watch only the sermon embedded below. One night when I was a child I saw two images that permanently shaped my relationship to creation. I grew up in Houston in a family of hunters. A few times… Continue reading “What God Has Entrusted to Us”
Preaching from the choir
On Thursday evening I went to the LaSalle Street Church sanctuary to record a sermon for this Sunday's streaming service. There's...a lot of emotion packed into that statement! It was my first time inside the church building since February 2020, and there are few religious spaces that mean as much to me as this sanctuary.… Continue reading Preaching from the choir
Brent Bailey 