Anthony B. Robinson

Tony is a writer, teacher, speaker and ordained minister (United Church of Christ). He served as Senior Minister of Seattle’s Plymouth Congregational Church for fourteen years. His newest book is Useful Wisdom: Letters to Young (and not so young) Ministers. He divides his time between Seattle and a cabin in Wallowa County of northeastern Oregon. If you’d like to know more or receive his regular blogs in your email, go to his site listed above to sign-up.

Peace of Mind in the ‘Attention Economy’

If the attention economy is new, the inner conflict between what we should do and what we actually do is very old, as old as Scripture.

The Ghost of Inauguration Past

It was 17 degrees on January 20, 1961, the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. There had been snow the night before and six to ten inches still lay on the sidewalks on Pennsylvania Avenue as work crews shoveled away.

Market-Driven Neo-Liberalism and the Rise of Mega-Churches

It occurs to me is that the neo-liberal period tracks pretty well with the emergence and ascendency of what we came to know as “the mega-church.”

Never Enough: The Acceleration Trap

Everything is constantly accelerating, moving faster. That feels pretty accurate, don’t you think? Go faster, work harder, do more, accomplish more in less time. It’s really crazy.

Now and Then: Dealing with This Time’s Trump Victory

Seeing Trump as what he is, an outlandish figure on the often wild and unpredictable landscape of American politis, may be our best move.

Questioning Your Diversity

And just as the Democrats have lost the working class, the non-college degreed, so too have liberal Protestants. That’s a big, but largely unacknowledged, factor in so-called “mainline decline.”

The Great Divide: College Degrees

The percent of the population today who are college graduates is 33%, which means that 67% — the large majority — are not. “A college diploma has replaced income as the new marker of social class and key dividing line in our elections.

On the Road Again (and why am I Sounding like Such a Curmudgeon?)

The upshot is that travel, like a lot of things in the land of the free and home of the brave is short on grace and graciousness.

Truth in Labeling: The Trump Voters

In the wake of the election, I’ve been trying to focus less on Trump himself (delegating that, so to speak, to a legion of others), and more on those who voted for him, many of them new in his camp as of this election.

Revolt Against the Elites: Up and Down, Not Right and Left

Maybe that left/right framework is missing something. Maybe it even misses what’s really going on today.

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