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.

Terminally Earnest? Hard to “Enjoy the Show”

We want to take seriously matters of justice and human suffering. As we should. But at some point, such seriousness — an excess of earnestness — becomes unbalanced and a little self-important.

The Classics and our need for Ambiguity

We seem now to be in a time when fewer people are willing to consider life’s complexity, and to the truth that “human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity.”

Navigating the Messy In-Between Before the End

Maybe a good time to take stock, to ask ourselves what have I learned? Are there things we have learned to take forward with us on the next leg of the journey? Are there other things that need, now, to be left behind?

Why Is Church Membership in America Falling Off a Cliff?

Overall, the cultural Christians, those who belonged because it was what you did and might have social benefits, don’t any longer. And in some parts of the country, the Northwest for example, this has entirely flipped. Being part of a church is considered, at best, curious, but often something far more suspect.

The Moral Nuances of Immigration

Eric Kaufmann insists that much of the resistance to mass immigration is not so much racist as merely conservative, emerging not from generalized loathing of others but from attachment to one’s own in times of rapid change. He makes a distinction between ‘racism’ and ‘racial self-interest,’ the first abhorrent, the second understandable. .

Will we Miss the Pandemic when it’s Gone?

While I would like to think that the pandemic has taught us to slow down, I’m skeptical.

Has Seattle Become a City that Doesn’t Work?

It does appear that the Council is more a staging ground for the nation’s culture and ideological wars than for civic leadership on local problems.

Seuss Saga: Time to Stand Down the Culture Wars

Right now, the Democrats have (more or less) called a retreat or moratorium on the culture wars and are actually facing into and solving the problems people care about.

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. Agreed, So Then What?

It was a wise Jewish mother who had said, “Men marry women with the intention that they will the stay the same. Women marry men with the idea that they will change.

Christianity Is Not a Religion. So what is it?

Growing up, I thought Christianity was really — boiled down — about being a good person. Actually it’s not about that.

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