Where's the Good Stuff this week?
Friday 4/24/26 roundup of what I've discovered on Substack
‘Good Stuff’ = blog posts I’ve read this week that inspired, educated, entertained, or moved me.
Which for a Free Range Priest, means reading more amazing, inspiring things about God, the church, the universe, and running.
Here’s this week’s roundup:
God stuff
‘Intentionally Complex’, by Christine Slater.
‘That means when I am longing for someone to notice and acknowledge me, heal, and take care of me, love and support me, He is always present and understands the intricate mechanics of each person, individually.That’s a useful thought when I am opening my fridge for something that won’t be there.’
‘Known in the Breaking’, by Whayne Hougland, Jr. ‘That’s not how resurrection tends to arrive. It arrives in the breaking. In a gesture repeated so many times that its ordinariness is part of the recognition. In the bread taken and blessed and broken and given at a table where nobody has it all figured out, where every one of us is, in some sense, walking our own road to Emmaus — a little lost, a little dazed and confused, a little bit slow getting the punchline, our hearts burning in ways we can’t yet explain’.
Church stuff
‘This is Not Simple Generational Replacement’ by Ryan Burge.
‘If you walked into a church any Sunday over the last 35 years, the person most likely sitting next to you was a Baby Boomer. That was true in 1990. It was still true in 2024.
Even as Boomers have gone from 45% of the GSS sample to just 25%, they remain the dominant force in American pews. That’s a genuinely hard thing to wrap your head around’.’Peace be with you (and also with you)’ by Janette Parker Platter.
’I became freshly aware that making peace isn’t passive, quiet, and avoidant. It is active, requires admitting that I’m wrong and still learning, and often disrupts my own comfort for the sake of making it right with another. And as is often true, this work of peace starts at home.’
Other stuff
‘Enjoy Every Sandwich’, by Sam Robinson.
‘What would it mean to redeem time? Is time something we must spend wisely (atone the time itself)? Or is time like a credit, one used to make our lives more worthy? For that matter, what, exactly, would redeemed time look like? Death only raises the stakes of such questions.’‘The Problem with Fear’, by Sean Dietrich.
‘And I can honestly say that after all these years of experiencing fear, I have learned something: Fear is not in your head. There are no thoughts you can think to get rid of it. Because fear is not a head problem. Fear starts in your soul’.
What I wrote this week:
‘My Digital Conversion’. ‘I don’t think it was a coincidence that I landed at a place where the internet was developing before my eyes, just as I was deep in the midst of religious formation’.
’Time for being with God in nature, and each other in conversation’. ‘We’re encouraging ourselves to be “fearless and faithful” in discussing what St. Paul’s could look like - or wants to be - in the future of church’.
And finally…
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