I've taught courses for New College Berkeley on and off for years and have been grateful for the unique relationships it has maintained with the GTU, Berkeley First Pres and other churches in the Bay Area, and with the long, rich tradition of Ignatian spirituality and spiritual direction.

Over the past couple of years, New College Berkeley has rededicated itself to being a "third space" where thoughtful people gather for cultural and theological reflection. This past year Craig Wong, who has taken hold of its directorship with a firm grip, deep prayer, and a great laugh, has pulled together public conversations that span an impressive range of topics, some of them urgent: human dignity and polarization; Christians in an age of empire; harmony with the land and each other; communal discernment; staying centered in election season; gospel faithfulness in the Bay Area; sacred icons; missional hermeneutics; Christians and AI; nationalism and trauma; and facing fear, among others.

This February, less than three weeks after what is possibly the most fraught and fought-over inauguration in our national history, I’ll be teaching a short course on “Approaches to Spiritual Autobiography.” In light of recent disturbances in public life and in the midst of calls to active, organized response, such self-reflection might seem to some a bit untimely—perhaps a bit too inwardly focused when so many feel we’re at a political turning point or tipping point.

The Spirit’s command to Ezekiel, “Eat this scroll,” is one of many startling moments in the history of prophecy.  I think of it when I’m reflecting on reading—a thing I do often, having spent much of my life as an English professor.  We eat the words we read:  we take them in; we ingest them; we rely on them for spiritual nourishment, as our bodies rely on food.  Eating is a powerful metaphor—and perhaps more than a metaphor—for reading.  It reminds us that we do not live by bread alone.

I looked around at my fellow passengers on a plane recently and thought, as I often have, “Everyone has a story.”  Each person there was in the middle of something—preparing for an interview, traveling to visit a dying parent, fundraising for a non-profit, taking kids to Disneyland, honeymooning, celebrating retirement.  The events that got them to that flight that day unfolded in the context of complicated lives full of turnings and decision points, disappointments and completions and new beginnings.  Each of them could have told not one story, but many.  

Now and then my husband and I find ourselves wanting to revisit films that linger in memory to refresh if not entirely recreate the inspiration or pleasure they once offered.  One on my list as 2018 begins is the 2000 film Pay it Forward.  In that story, as many will recall, a disheartened teacher challenges his students to devise and carry out a creative philanthropic project.  A twelve-year-old boy takes on the assignment with elfin imagination:  Upending the common wisdom of “paying back” what you owe, he sets out to discover what might happen if, instead, one were to pay it forward to someone else.  So if someone does you a favor, you might do a similar favor for a third party, moving the original kindness along into widening circles of influence.  

  By some reckonings, only eleven countries in the world are currently “conflict-free.” Everywhere else civil war, rampant gang killings, foreign invasions, or oppressive police states threaten citizens’ lives. In many war zones, most of the victims are children (half of the 100,000 civilian casualties in the recent battle for Mosul, for instance); they die not just of the violence perpetrated around them, but of diseases caused by contamination where water and sewage systems have been destroyed, or by political sanctions that make medication and emergency services widely unavailable. We hear the word “war” so often, it is hard to sustain either the moral outrage or the lively compassion it ought to awaken in us.