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.

Northeastern Oregon, Where Wearing Masks is a Signal

The wearing and non-wearing of masks serves as a convenient statement in this rural county. Wearing one in town I definitely felt like I was signaling my tribal identity, which seems crazy, but there it is."

The Long, Slow Fade of Mainline Protestant Churches

In an essay titled “Awakenings,” the novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson, spoke of the Calvinist and Reformed theological tradition, which informed Lincoln and his transcendent framing of the Civil War. Of that tradition, she writes, “I no longer see much trace of it in America today."

Weird Times, ‘Weird Christianity’

Saul Bellow: “It is hard to see how modern man can survive on what he now gets from his conscious life — now that there is a kind of veto against impermissible thoughts, the most impermissible being the notion that man might have a spiritual life he is not conscious of which reaches out for transcendence.”

A Pandemic Gift: Stumbling Upon the ‘Good-Enough’ Life

My subversive thought is that large swaths of our society are not afflicted primarily by low expectations, so much as unrelenting, burdensomely high expectations.

Why Is Trump’s Needy, Anxious Base Unshakably Stuck To Him?

The key thing, for my purposes of understanding the Trump base, is that the narcissist and his circle of admirers are bound together in a state of “emotional fusion.”

Rebecca Solnit’s Book: Remaking Our Lives Amid Major Disasters

Disasters are “extraordinarily generative,” Solnit contends. From them emerge new ways of seeing the world and one another. Fruitless preoccupations suddenly fade away. Hitherto un-imagined possibilities emerge.

How You Define: Being Versus Doing

Being is just that. Being here, now. Noticing our state of being, how it is with our spirit. Now, in the Great Silence or Long Emptiness, is not so great for those of us who prefer doing to being.

After COVID: What Will Be The New Normal?

Is it possible that this world-wide disaster, which is far from over, has put on vivid display the disastrous consequences of denialism?

The Fallacy (and Laziness) of Both-Sides-ism

The Republicans and the Democrats are not the same. Underlying too much of contemporary reporting is a “false equivalency,” which posits that by representing “both sides” balance and objectivity are attained.

Testing… Testing… (and our anxiety grows)

It is not a sin to be anxious. It comes with the territory. But when we’re too anxious, when our anxiety takes over, we are more likely to do bad things.

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