August 2024 Dear Pres House family, Serving as pastor and executive director at Pres House for the past 20 years has been a highlight of my professional career and of my life in general. It is impossible to fully articulate…
Mark is the Executive Director at Pres House. How did a group of folks from Pres House end up spending a week touring Nicaragua in January to learn about history, politics, culture, people, and microfinance? Well we took a flight…
As part of my journey toward ordination in the PC(USA), I recently completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Oakwood Village Prairie Ridge, a senior living facility here in Madison. Though I have shared a bit about my…
Recently, a video appeared online of a UW-Madison student making some racist remarks. In the wake of the video’s release, students on campus launched a number of responses: protests, demands of the administration, a petition calling for the student’s expulsion,…
A little more than 10 years ago I had lunch with Ginger Morgan at a buffet restaurant in the shadow of the Wisconsin Capitol. She was visiting Madison from Colorado and interviewing at Pres House for our newly created Director…
On Monday, March 29, the Arkansas State Senate passed HB 1570. According to the ACLU, “HB 1570 would prohibit healthcare professionals from providing or even referring transgender young people for medically necessary health care. It would bar any state funds…
This has been a hard week with the murder of Asian women in Atlanta by a white, Southern Baptist man, in a year when anti-Asian violence has exploded around the country. I have struggled with what to say because there…
Lectio divina (sacred reading) is slow, intentional, prayerful reading of Scripture. It is a very ancient way of reading the Bible, with distinct “movements” which help us to clear our minds and become aware of God’s presence with us as…
In this era of COVID, time has taken on an ambiguous quality where days bleed together as we have lost some of the structures and rituals which usually mark our days more clearly. We can multitask many activities at the…
One of my favorite quotes on prayer comes from a short blog post by Brian Zahnd, a pastor from St. Joseph, MO. He says, The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want [God]…