“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends[…]

He said to them, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”  –Luke 16:31 The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is quite a story, isn’t it? Some would say “a hell of a story!”  It is as[…]

As I prepared to participate in a local No Kings event, I was reminded that the seeds of today’s horrors were planted long ago and have been nurtured through many generations.    This is not only time for protest and resistance to evil, but a collective gut-check, a call to renewed personal integrity and commitment,[…]

For me, there is not much that is better than getting together with a group of people in a retreat or workshop space, taking real time, and exploring together the vast yet very specific territory (ies) of forgiveness.  In a recent gathering of a dozen people, I probed our collective understandings of forgiveness.  The response[…]

    (This is the third in a series of reflections on Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower.) In his response to The Sunflower, Rabbi Arthur Waskow wishes to ask the Nazi in the story, “What would it mean for me to “forgive” you?”  It is a key question.  Before any considerations of whether Simon Wiesenthal “should” have forgiven the dying[…]

(This is the second in a series of reflections on Simon Wiesenthal’s classic The Sunflower: on the possibilities and limits of forgiveness.) “I read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man’s firm belief.  If ever I thought that were true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently.  It is impossible to believe[…]

The Sunflower is a remarkable, disturbing, and evocative book; the kind that will not let you go.  The author, Simon Wiesenthal, was a holocaust survivor.  Here, he writes vividly of his experiences as a resident of the Jewish ghetto in Lemburg (now Lviv,Ukraine) and as a prisoner in the Janowska concentration camp during the Nazi occupation. […]

“People came (to social media) with pre-made ideas and put them into their binary boxes of how they want to see the political world right now.”  –Noam Shuster-Eliassi On October 7th of last year, forces of Hamas launched horrific attacks on communities in southern Israel.  The savagery that has been revealed included the murder of[…]

“Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.  Jesus is not an impractical idealist: He is a practical realist. . .  We must develop[…]

(This dialogue is the second of a series originally published in 2017 at http://www.breathingforgiveness.net) As a combat veteran, I have killed others.  In war those killed on the ground, up close and personal, are called enemies.  Later on in a veteran’s life he or she becomes more conscious of a nagging feeling, uncertainty or doubt that[…]