Author: Justin Lockridge
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The Reckoning: When Self-Forgiveness is Your Toughest Assignment
As the great Anne Lamott so charmingly put it, “Forgiveness means you’ve decided not to kill them.” A lovely sentiment, really. We hand out that kind of grace like it’s a participation trophy, don’t we? It’s easy, almost a performance art. We stand on our moral high ground, nodding sagely at someone else’s obvious character…
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The Pulpit of the Podcaster: Where Modern Sermons Get Downloaded
The modern pulpit it seems has gone mobile. It’s no longer confined to the hallowed halls of brick and mortar but has been downloaded streamed and whispered directly into the ears of a global congregation. The modern-day prophet is no longer robed and standing behind a finely carved lectern but is probably wearing a hoodie…
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The Price of Our Hatred
There was a post scheduled for today, a quiet moment of reflection on the anniversary of September 11th. It was meant to be a look back at a singular act of national violence, a moment that left an indelible scar on the American psyche. But in the strange and unsettling way that history repeats itself,…
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Miracles of the Mundane: Finding Awe in the Everyday Absurdity
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time spent in the trenches of human experience, it’s that we’ve been utterly and completely lied to about miracles. They aren’t the dramatic, parted-seas, water-into-wine kind of events we’ve been sold on since we were children. Those are just cosmic parlor tricks, the sort of flashy spectacle…
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The Ethics of Awkward Silence: When to Speak Up, When to Just Nod.
A well-timed awkward silence can be an act of profound social engineering. It’s that moment at the family dinner or the work function when someone makes a comment so perfectly wrong, so brilliantly ignorant, that the entire room seems to hold its collective breath. You can almost feel the moral tension in the air. We’ve…
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Why Doubt Isn’t the Enemy of Faith (It’s Probably Its Best Friend)
Doubt. It’s the great heresy, the existential villain of every Sunday school lesson, and the silent assassin of countless heartfelt beliefs. We’re taught to see it as faith’s enemy, that insidious whisper on our shoulder in a world that desperately wants us to just sit down, shut up, and believe. But this is a profound…
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The Art of the Grudging Optimist: Embracing Hope When You’d Rather Just Complain.
Optimism. It’s a word that sits uncomfortably in the modern mouth, tasting of saccharine and naiveté. For anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex and a data plan, an honest look at the world is enough to make a proper cynic out of anyone. The daily news is a relentless, global tutorial on why hope is…
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A City of Discarded Dreams and Lime Scooters
Ah, the majestic urban sprawl of Milwaukee, a city renowned for its brewing heritage, its stunning lakefront, and now, apparently, its burgeoning population of derelict Lime scooters. It seems the universe, in its infinite wisdom and questionable humor, has decided to grace our fair city with an abundance of these bright green mechanical locusts, scattered…
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The Compassionate Contagion: How Empathy Becomes a Revolutionary Act
We’ve turned the entire world into a single, global comment section, where every headline is a starting gun and every opinion is a battle cry. But for a great many people, that isn’t a game; it’s just Tuesday. It’s the daily reality of a queer person calculating their personal safety before holding a partner’s hand,…
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The Divine Comedy: When Faith and Logic Have a Drink
I have a friend who, in a bold and public display of intellectual courage, announced on Facebook that he was finally going to tackle Dante’s The Divine Comedy. My immediate thought was, “Oh, bless your heart.” My second was to wonder if he knew what he was really getting into. Because while most people see…
JUSTIN LOCKRIDGE 