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52 Years Old Today – I Am Finally Paying Attention to The Earth Cláudio Carvalhaes It is my turn to celebrate my birthday in the midst of COVID. We are all caught into this garment of death that we brought upon ourselves. COVID is showing us an alarming note saying: “you don’t have limits, you enter anywhere you want to get whatever you desire and turn everything into stuff, or if you allow me: shit! And since you can’t stop, welcome to the new time of plagues!”   Perhaps we never realized before that we all can only live if…

I just finished a class on sacraments and the earth and this was my final blessings to my students. A Blessing to you all Inspired by “Thesis for an Atomic Era,” Günther Anders     A life better lived is a life where blessings, that is, forms of wishes, hopes, desires and modes of life circulate around people as care, challenge and sustenance. You have blessed me during this course, so I now bless you with these blessings.   I bless you with all that is sacred, the sacred that flows in energies, mutations, symbiosis and transformations.   I bless…

Earth Day – April 20, 2020 – Central PA   Song – “Todo Cambia,” Merdeces Sosa Introduction   Greetings everyone. I greet you from the land of the indigenous people: Delaware, Susquehannock, Shawnee, and Iroquois. Blessed be them! Their land was stolen and taken away.   I would never imagine that I would preach from a backyard for James Chapel one day. I love James Chapel a very special place, a place where I have been visited by God so many times. But today we are here living under the Pandemic and many of us in our homes. We pray for…

Being the Church as we live with COVID19[1] Cláudio Carvalhaes   What Is This Virus Doing To Us?   Coronavirus has come to stay with us for a while. Exactly how long, we don’t know. How many people will be affected, we don’t know. This moment is asking us to reimagine our lives and ways of being, which at the moment includes the way congregations’ worship since we cannot gather together in person right now.   With this text, I want to spark conversation about how to be the church at this time, trying to open up some liturgical-theological options…

There is so much we could say about our precious Ernesto Cardenal. One is his influence on so many people. Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellissays of the influence of liberation theologians and Cardenal: “As a Jew, after Auschwitz and as I began to understand what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people, my encounter with Christian theologies of liberation was a God-send. It was less its Christian focus; I encountered there a human hope, that through struggle, I, with others, could become a sign of hope in the world… On the day Cardenal died, decades after I…