Pastoral Letters

January 15, 2018 Dear Pastor Kenny: Long time no write, but I thought of you a great deal yesterday and wanted to tell you all about it. For an Atheist like myself, it was certainly a very religious day. However, first let me share some amazingly weird news, so the following makes more sense. Last year I blurted out to Miami District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell, a gent I have come to know over the last few years, that I loved his life story and wanted to be the one who writes it. He didn’t laugh. We started kicking around a few ideas for a ...

Dear Pastor Kenny: It was great seeing you last month, as unexpected as it was. Almost immediately after the Not Now Silly Newsroom officially announced there would be no Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research this year …. What’s that old Jewish expression? “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Since God and I are not on speaking terms, I have absolutely no idea how He might have learned of my plans to stay home this year. Unless He reads my facebookery. When I made my announcement, I obviously didn’t know that Hurricane Irma would force a Road ...

Pastor Ken Wilson of the Blue Ocean Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan, replies to What Is It All About?, my Pastoral Letter of last week. An Atheist without guile, indeed. Your Gilchrist memories triggered my own, for some reason, of a time I was in my parents attic–it must have been when they were moving out of the Detroit house to the Southfield apartment. Under what they called “the eaves”, in the second floor attic remodeled as a master bedroom, was a box of letters. And the one that came to me like a bolt of revelation was one my father saved, written to him ...

Dear Pastor Kenny: Reconnecting after 45 years apart (and linking up on the facebookery) has been a blessing, if you don’t mind this Atheist appropriating a religious term. Watching your growing politicization since we renewed our friendship in November of 2014 has been a wonderment to behold. Certainly your walk in the desert began before we rediscovered each other, when you started the thinking that led to the research, which resulted in your writing A Letter To My Congregation. You ran headlong into church and LGBT politics after it was published in book form. Soon after we reconnected, church politics ran ...

Dear Pastor Kenny: Thank you so much for the book. It was on my doorstep when I arrived home. I was locked out when I got here (long story), so I read it and finished it while waiting for the locksmith. It brought me to tears, but many things do these days. My emotions are still raw. It is a wonderful book which I will now recommend to others who have just lost a loved one. It was also wonderful for you and Julia to come to Pops’ Shiva on Sunday. It meant so much to me. Aside from the fact that ...