A friend online posted a link to John Pavlovitz’s My Emancipation From American Christianity. Here is what I shared as a comment:

This past year, I felt a strong calling to become an Episcopalian priest. This coming year will be a year of trying to discern exactly what that calling is. I shudder when I see titles like this, but I think this article really captures what many American Christians are struggling with.

One book I recently read suggested that Christianity, a religion based on death and resurrection, needs to see the death of the American Christianity Pavlovitz and many of us have outgrown, and a resurrection of a Christianity " that looks more like God and feels more like love."

One paragraph that particularly jumped out at me was

If religion it is to be worth holding on to, it should be the place where the marginalized feel the most visible, where the hurting receive the most tender care, where the outsiders find the safest refuge.

The moment when God’s call to me felt most palpable was during a guided meditation at a poetry workshop at Yale Divinity School. I sat there, surrounded by priests and seminarians, feeling like an outsider, but feeling I was in a safe refuge being prepared to be sent out to provide tender care to the hurting and marginalized.