It was irritating, and yet it was fascinating — in an “oh my God” sort of way. On the morning Amtrak train to Penn Station, two 20-something women sitting behind me kept up a nonstop dialogue for nearly two hours. Their topics were inane with not a shred of content. No listening, just pushing out words intended to be clever. Every now and then, one or the other would say, “Oh my God,” and then voice some surprising situation, like a boy who never called or a friend who was trapped in bad hair. On the one hand, “Oh my God” was verbal filler. But it also expressed an understanding of God as the one who explains the surprises of life, the one who makes sense of the perplexing. This wasn’t the expletive that calls down God’s fire. Or the teenager’s “Oh God!” aimed at snarking a grown-up. No, this was different. The two young women clearly were grappling with issues for which family, schooling and life hadn’t prepared them. They were at sea. They had a friendship and a birthday … [Read more...]

When I trained to be an emergency medical technician, this was a paramount lesson: Identify the life threats. Your patient might be complaining about a sore shoulder, but if blood is spurting from a ruptured artery, deal with the bleeding first. Don’t pursue the problem you understand, like splinting a bone, but fail to see the problem you don’t understand, like inhalation of toxic fumes. When well-meaning believers want to work on having conversations about tough topics, we need first to see what is truly tough — not the issues that make us squeamish or angry, but the issues that are life-threats: the ones destroying human lives and drawing our neighbors and us into the orbit of evil. We will disagree on what the tough topics are, but one thing is clear: Tackling the issue we tackled last year just because we know how to have that conversation is a mistake. The point isn’t to get better at having a conversation, but making sure we are talking about the right things. I know … [Read more...]