A New Hope Rising: The Promise of a New Creation The peace that Isaiah envisions is not a ceasefire, not a truce, but a total reordering of human life around the presence of God. And again, Christians recognize this in Christ. He is the one who makes peace — not by force, not by intimidation, but…

A blessed and happy Thanksgiving Day to you and all the people in your life May your day be filled with memories and blessings.

A Thanksgiving message from Bishop Knisely m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsrh...

This. So much this... daringfireball.net/linked/2025/...

Confirmation at St. John's in Barrington and then lunch with the deacons. What a great way to send the Last Sunday in Pentecost! 🕯️

The True Power of Forgiveness and Compassion On this final Sunday of the liturgical year, the lectionary places before us a strange and unsettling image of kingship. Not a coronation. Not a throne room. Not a ruler surrounded by splendor. Instead: a hill outside the city. A bruised and broken…

Are you ready to make your defense? Three years ago, when the Gospel assigned for this week last was read, I had this to say: In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is warning us that the Apocalypse is coming. That word, apocalypse means “hidden” in Greek. Jesus is telling us in the Gospel today that…

For those who are chasing the Northern Lights, follow this real-time report on when the KP index will near 8 kp. It will fluctuate throughout the night. cdn.softservenews.com/Aurora.htm

Aurora in RI over Quonset

The Mystery of the Lawless One When we turn to this passage from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, we find ourselves face to face with language that sounds, frankly, a bit mysterious—and even unsettling. Paul is warning his readers not to be “quickly shaken in mind or alarmed,” even…

Social media can push us to the dark side, with negative content. A new study finds watching inspiring videos for just 3 minutes a day is on par with meditation for boosting mood and reducing stress.

All Saints 2025: Do you still believe in the future? There’s a question at the heart of All Saints’ Day. It’s not a question we usually ask out loud in church, but it sits quietly in the background of our prayers and hymns, in the candles and the names spoken at the altar. The question is this:Do…

Sermon for the 234th Convention of the Diocese of Rhode Island Convention 2025 Sermon Texts:Isaiah 55:10-11Matthew 13:1-9 “Let’s take a moment. Close your eyes and picture a bright spring morning. The sky is blue, the air is crisp and imagine you are standing in a newly plowed field—a New England…

Have Faith 401 My address to the 234th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island2025 Have Faith 401 — Convention Address A number of years ago, at a meeting of General Convention, I heard that a bishop from Central Africa had said something that has stayed with me since. I was chairing…

The Pride of the Fallen It is often said that more miracles happen in a church basement than in the nave. In the nave, we use the polished brass, we process in order, we sing beautiful hymns, we hear fine sermons. It’s holy space—yes—but it can sometimes become a place where we perform our piety.…

Persistant Prayer when facing a World Filled with Injustice Jesus’ parable is not just about prayer as personal comfort. It’s about the kind of prayer that sustains action. We’re told to keep working even when we don’t see the fruits of our labor. Many of the great movements toward justice in our…

The Problem is that We Don’t Understand Why We Should Be Thankful Philip Jenkins has written about why the Bible speaks so naturally to many Africans today. The world of Scripture—its agricultural life, its social relations—is much closer to their own experience than to ours. He points to verses…

Faith like a mustard seed doesn’t mean what you probably think it does Having Faith as St. Paul or as Our Lord seems to use it here doesn’t mean that we have to believe a certain set of logical propositions to be saved. It’s also not about believing in one key idea that serves as a magic talisman…

Former Republican congressman from SC, Bob Inglis speaks following Sen. Whitehouse at the Bipartisan Climate Change Conference here in RI. ⚓️

Senator Whitehouse speaking at the Bipartisan Conversation on Climate Change sponsored this morning by the Episcopal Diocese of RI.

Turning reality upside down for our neighbors, especially the powerful ones One of the most striking features of St. Luke’s gospel is the constantly repeated theme of reversal. People who were on the outside of the community are now inside. People who were powerful in their life are now powerless.…

Beautiful ordination of three deacons this morning. Our diocese will be blest by their ministry.

Forgiveness is the Currency of the Kingdom of God What the steward in this week’s parable actually does is to forgive people. He cancels debts. He uses forgiveness as the coin of the realm. Jesus himself seems to reinforce this point. In the Lord’s Prayer, the only conditional is this: Forgive us…

Being Found and Rejoicing; our search for the lost brings our own healing too This week we begin a series of readings in St. Luke’s Gospe that sometimes described as the Gospel of the Outcasts. It’s about finding those who are pushed to the edges, those who are living on the margins, those who are…

Friction and Flourishing: Sabbath as solution Artificial Intelligence makes an alluring promise: a frictionless life. Already, it is possible to summon almost anything with a voice command or a swipe. A pizza arrives when we want it, wherever we are. Some speculate that soon enough, our personal…

To reject one thing is an invitation to trust in something else. entangledstates.org/2025/09/06/t...

Untitled Socrates once pointed out that even those who claimed to reject honor— like the Cynics, who would walk through the marketplace without shame— were really just chasing honor of a different kind. They wanted people to admire their shamelessness. They were still playing the same game as the…

Jesus stoops so that we can stand Luke tells us of a woman who had been bent over for eighteen long years. She couldn’t stand up straight. She couldn’t lift her eyes to meet another’s face. She couldn’t walk into a room with dignity, or even look up at the heavens. She was quite literally bowed…

Setting the World on Fire I’m on vacation through the end of August. I’ve reworked the sermon I preached three years ago and will be preaching it at the Chapel of St. John in Saunderstown where I’m the supply clergy this weekend while one of our clergy is on vacation herself.  (Yeah.. I know… but…

If you want to know which way you’re headed, look to see where your heart is set. There are seasons when poverty, or illness, or oppression — whether material or spiritual — hem us in so tightly that we can’t see where we’re going. It’s like walking through a forest so thick we can’t see the sky.…

Obituary: Bishop Hays Hamilton Rockwell

Learning to listen is the first step on the path to spiritual growth There’s a man, a rich man, whose land produces abundantly. He’s not portrayed as wicked. He doesn’t cheat anyone. He doesn’t exploit his workers or seize land from the poor. He simply has a very good year. And in response to his…

Prayer, especially the prayer of a community, can change God’s heart This teaching on prayer follows directly after the story of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary in Bethany— a story Luke has inserted while Jesus is still “on the road” to Jerusalem. As I said last week: Luke seems to be using these…

Be a Mary? Be a Martha? The week’s Gospel, the story of the visit of Jesus to Martha and Mary in their home, is about balance as much as it is about anything else. Yes, we’re supposed to be busy and industrious. We’re supposed to do the things we’re expected to do and care for the challenges…

The social media algorithm is at the heart of our present division. Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms - ScienceDirect: Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social…

Look to the Outcast Look carefully at the outcast. Your salvation might very well depend on one of them. When a well dressed group of students pretended to have heart attacks in the hallways of the Port Authority - the only ones who reached out to them were the homeless people. When we realized…

The more I study the impact of AI on Society, the more concerned I am about how AI will make it easier and more efficient to "flood the zone with crap". It's not just something to annoyed about. We need to plan a response. theconversation.com/misinformati...

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. Most people think they’re good people. And many think that they’re doing what they do out of love - and if other people don’t see that, it means that the other people just aren’t as smart or as wise as the decision maker. And…

High winds and lightning here. People are still on the beach and on small boats hoping for fireworks. Yikes. Prayers for everybody.

Theology is meant to draw us closer to God. Is that something a chatbot can help with? The more I think about what Chatbots are and what they aren’t, the more I think of them, not so much as a stochastic parrot, but as a tool that we’re trying to use for the wrong purpose. There are some discrete…

AI and human psychosis, greed makes things worse People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis": Jared Moore, the lead author on the Stanford study about therapist chatbots and a PhD candidate at Stanford, said chatbot sycophancy — their penchant to be…

Unexpected Grace: When God Loves the Outcasts This whole Gospel reading is a call back to a series of events in the lives of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha. But the way the events play out are different in important ways from the way the account unfolds in the second Book of Kings. Pay attention…

Jesus strides across Creation, setting right what is broken and restoring it to what was originally intended. God, walking among us in Jesus, is setting right what human choices have set askew. Nowhere is this clearer than in today’s Gospel reading. A man—naked, exiled, tormented—has been taken…

New tech, new artifacts A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. - The New York Times: Johnson has been thinking all along about ways that historians and other authors could make money through the app. In our conversation in Mountain View, he put forward a possible new revenue stream: What if…

The Gentle Guidance of the Holy Spirit Why is the doctrine of the Trinity important to us today? Is it more than just a relic of long, complicated conversations that the earlier Church had as it tried to make sense of its experience of One God who was known to us in three persons… which created…

Can a Chatbot experience beauty or does it have taste? Speaking of AI and the illusion of sentience that seems to be tripping us up: "However much AI can mimic us or exceed us in certain capacities we can observe, still, that wouldn’t mean that AI is conscious, that it has subjective experience…

The real danger of AI isn’t AGI, it’s human’s mistaking what they are encountering What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or…

Pentecost: The Tower of Babel undone I’m afraid I must recycle an earlier sermon this week. It’s been a week filled with pastoral matters and meetings. I’m “locked out” of the studio I use for filming as well - given some guests that are staying here. I’m at St. Mark’s in Warwick for worship…

Only on @sciam.bsky.social! “I was not prepared to be contending with an LLM like this... That’s what a scientist does. That’s frightening.” www.scientificamerican.com/article/insi...

Popular Christian Theology in the US has gone off-course. Again. Opinion | Selfishness Is Not a Virtue - The New York Times: (gift link) America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again…