Breonna Taylor is dead — not as a character in fiction, or as a symbol or allegory of anything. Her death is a thing to be grieved on its own terms, and the loss of any human life does not require the burden of any additional “meaning” in order to matter. It is right for her to be remembered and to be revered, even to take her place among the great cloud of witnesses that both surround us and go before us in a long cosmic struggle for justice…

Two years ago, I sparred publicly with Jerry Falwell Jr. for a week or two, igniting a heated debate on campus at Liberty University that spilled over into national media. I had gone to see my friends Johnnyswim (Abner and Amanda Ramirez) in concert at Liberty University, when I was escorted out of their green room by armed campus police, threatened with arrest, and banned from campus for life…

Because the fundamental character of human existence is jagged, nonlinear, and complex rather than simple, and every person is a mystery, most especially to themselves, finding a narrative that makes sense of the world is mostly a child’s game of playing pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded—it’s arbitrary…

Our competing realities share one thing in common: they invite us to undergo the demything of America…

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” — Isaiah 53.3

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin

I do not have a right to feel any of the things that I feel — the seasickness, the liquid rage…

It happened in the middle of the day. Two videos set the internet ablaze this week, for very different reasons. One, filmed in broad daylight, shows Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old black man, under a canopy of trees, jogging around a stopped white pickup truck near Brunswick, Georgia. Two men emerge from the truck, one with a rifle, one with a handgun…

Monday will be the one year anniversary of when my friend Rachel Held Evans left this world and joined the great cloud of witnesses. These photos are from February of last year when I went to see her and Dan and the kids at their home in Dayton, TN just before I moved from Nashville to OKC; and spent the most magical day there. That whole experience—eating the leftover spaghetti casserole Rachel warmed up for lunch—is such a treasure to me…

"But do you PRAY for President Trump?” As a church leader who has been outspoken about the Trump phenomenon, that is the first question offended evangelicals ask me. Usually, it’s with a mixture of outrage and triumph, a sense that they have just played the trump card…”I just Jesus-juked a pastor!” Well, since you asked…yes, as a matter of fact, I really DO pray for President Trump…

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

The doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to.

— Donald Justice

I am neither especially threatened nor particularly drawn to the idea of “milestone birthdays.” And yet just around the corner from turning a certain age later this month, I find myself unable to avoid being reflective about the shape of my story, thus far…

Having been to 23 shows—and with a tattoo of a heart in a suitcase on my forearm—I can feign no objectivity when it comes to U2. Yet as fan, I take the U2 canon too seriously to fawn over every album uncritically. Yes, I would contend that in 13 previous studio albums, they have yet to have a real embarrassment. But I would also concede that U2’s albums in the 2000’s (post-All That You Can’t Leave Behind) have fallen just short of greatness. Granted, the standards set by the back catalogue are impossibly high: the towering genius of consecutive rock classics in Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, were followed by the apocalyptic Zooropa and the horrifically underrated Pop, both of which pulsed with brilliance in their own way…

In 2008, I wrote this chapter for a book called Pentecostals & Nonviolence: Reclaiming a Heritage. I talked about Sister Margaret at length in it. I was just going to post the part of the chapter that talks about her explicitly, but the upon re-reading....she's really the through line for all of it, my primary influence in how I understand the vocation of Christian peacemaking (among many other things). So I'm posting it in its entirety, even a little bit self-conscious that my writing was not so refined back in 2008 :)

Pastoring a Peace Church

By Jonathan Martin

I will never forget the Saturday afternoon last fall when I heard horrible screaming coming from our front yard…

Friends: I got some sad news a few minutes ago. Sister Margaret Gaines was found dead in her home this morning. She was 85. I have long referred to her as my spiritual grandmother. She was the person who most shaped my faith. To be in her presence, was to be saturated with Jesus.

In tribute, I wanted to post a section from my first book, Prototype, in which I wrote about her at length:

The week after Christmas, I was sleeping on the sofa hide-a-bed in Pell City, Alabama, when the delicate sounds of 80-year-old Sister Margaret Gaines working quietly in the adjacent kitchen slowly woke me…

Today, I feel the need to testify. Will you let me?

*major disclaimer first: As far as I know, I’m in the healthiest place I’ve ever been, spiritually & emotionally. I’m still here! I’m very much alive! I’m grateful. So please don’t read any sense of playing the martyr or victim here. Nothing could be further from the truth. I share this only as testimony to the faithfulness of God; only because my cup feels so full, not because it is empty…

Today I was re-reading Stanley Hauerwas' brilliant and beautiful commentary on Matthew in preparation to preach in Tulsa tomorrow, and it got me feeling nostalgic. I still remember the day I finally got up the courage to knock on the door of his fourth-floor office at Duke Divinity School, after pacing around it for 40 minutes from sheer intimidation! I wanted to take his class on Catholic Moral Theology, but it was full--so I had to get permission directly from him. We had not met…

I am burdened for the sons and daughters of the Charismatic movement in North America, many of whom are attempting to navigate an impossibly difficult in-between space, in this complex season…

I woke up alone at 2am Saturday night, to the sound of my own sobbing.

I went to bed thinking about my friends in Houston, in the middle of the hurricane. And then I dreamed that I was actually in Houston, in the home of a man I did not know, who was giving me a tour of his home after the storm. His red and white house was bright and beautiful, had already been almost completely repaired. On the wall, I saw several pictures of a beautiful big dog, and I asked my new friend about him. I watched tears fill his eyes…

Paul and Silas were on their way to “the place of prayer,” when a demonized slave-girl, exploited by the townsfolk for financial gain, began following them around. The evil spirit that possessed her gave her power to tell people’s future, and a cottage industry had been built up around her dark “gift.” She was a slave not only to this spirit, but to the real-world powers that had turned a daughter into a commodity. As she followed Paul and Silas around, she cried out in a loud voice, “THESE MEN ARE SERVANTS OF THE MOST HIGH GOD, WHO PROCLAIM TO YOU THE WAY OF SALVATION.” The words that she spoke were technically correct: Paul and Silas were in fact servants of the most high God, and they were in fact proclaiming the way of salvation…

I write these words trapped behind the wall of a screen that keeps us safe from each other, & that keeps us from healing each other.

I am sorry that this is a one-way conversation. I hate that you can see me, but I can’t see you. These are intimate things, not the stuff you discuss with perfect strangers…and the last thing you need is another sermon, or a monologue. I wish you could tell me all about it—about the girl or boy that broke your heart, or your catastrophic failure, or the doubt that has simmered just beneath the surface, for as long as you can remember. I’d love to hear all of your reasons, for breaking up with God…

The King comes riding into Jerusalem, on the back of a borrowed donkey. The man rides like an apology, a slapstick parody of power, a send-up of pomp and circumstance. The man rides under the weight of all our collective loneliness, as well as his own. With no stallion, no army, and no pretension, Love himself rides solo in the parade of powerlessness. Royalty, at last, has no entourage…

I rarely write about the art of speaking/preaching, for a few reasons: a) I’m a streaky communicator who still misfires from the stage on a regular basis, and, b) my own approach to speaking is too mystical, intuitive, almost shamanistic to explain easily, and, c) speaking is intimate soul connection to me, and thus seems about as appropriate to talk about at dinner with strangers as making love, for similar reasons…