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The Wells Sermons are  the three sermons that I preached at the Ministers Week- February 2023 Conference at Brite Divinity School.       SERMON ONE – Inventory – Looking Back   Ecclesiastes 7:10 Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’    For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.   Lamentations 3: 21     But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.   May the peace of Jesus be with you all. I am so happy to be here with you. I want to thank the folks from Brite Divinity…

Yesterday I wept like I haven’t wept for a long time. It was an oceanic type of weeping, one that was wider than the whole world. A cry that made me believe again in things I had given up… I went to bed late because I couldn’t stop weeping. And all of that was because of the inauguration of Brazil’s new president: Lula, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Let me tell you why. Lula has become the president of Brazil for the third time and the inauguration had a rite of passage where Lula was becoming the president of Brazil.…

Pelé died yesterday and the worlds heartbeat stopped beating for a little for me. I am not old enough to have seen Pelé play in his fulness. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico with the most mesmerizing soccer team in history, I was one year old. But I am old enough to remember him playing at Cosmos and finishing his career saying to a packed stadium in New York City: “repeat after me: Love Love Love.” As I write from New York, I can feel his words echoing in my memory. Pelé (and Corinthians) made my childhood be…

Ritual at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology. By Cláudio Carvalhaes. York, PA: Barber’s Son Press, 2021. 344 pp. $59.00 Reviewed by: Rachel Joy Wheeler (bio) Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality Volume 22, Number 2, Fall 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press I was delighted to be gifted with this book by a colleague who has been the liturgist and pastoral musician at the Catholic parish where I belong. This colleague has worked with me over the years in such a patient manner by reassuring me, especially when I have made mistakes, that “liturgy is messy,” something Carvalhaes’ book…