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![[From Maine youth] Our Prayer for Justice](https://thebtscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/blog-post-feat-image-1080x675.png)
[From Maine youth] Our Prayer for Justice
Our longing for Justice is Rooted in the love for our global community: Every soul honored. Justice for those who are my people. Justice for those who aren’t. Justice for homeless people. Justice for the children being brought up in this oppressive world. Justice for...
[From Maine youth] Our Prayer for Justice
Our longing for Justice is Rooted in the love for our global community: Every soul honored. Justice for those who are my people. Justice for those who aren’t. Justice for homeless people. Justice for the children being brought up in this oppressive world. Justice for...
The Story of a Worthwhile Future: 3 takeaways for storytellers from our eco-writers’ retreat
Scientists pen memoirs. Preachers sing the blues. Historians catalog their prayers, and homileticians dream in sci-fi, and clergy tell new...
Honoring Johan Sebastián Guerrero; Maine-based resources
Beloved: All creation groans for another – a better – way. A reality other than one in which our neighbors can be murdered by federal agents. By...
An Invitation to Touch Our Humanity: On Art & Resistance
When humans create art – in contrast with AI-generated attempts, the process is often messy, unwieldy, time-consuming, full of avenues...
“The Dangerous Ministry of Telling the Truth”
Recently, The BTS Center hosted our third annual Green Teams Gathering, which drew together almost 100 people representing congregational...
![Land and Sea, She Created Them [a poem]](https://thebtscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/4-400x250.png)
Land and Sea, She Created Them [a poem]
And on a Monday*, there came to be wildflowers, because of course they are a Monday people: prodigious, pearlificent, angiosperm (which is to mean...
Poetry + Prophecy: What Choices Do We Have?
Myrtle Beach, SC, was a segregated town in the early 1900s. In town was Charlie’s Place: a Black-owned club for Black people in a town where...
Tales of Perilous Comforts
What is the cost, I wondered, of forgetting about our radical interdependence, of what is sometimes called ubuntu, “I am, because we are.”
![Undertakers [a poem]](https://thebtscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1-400x250.png)
Undertakers [a poem]
Quiet, please, for the sexton beetles, who lower into the earth, slowly, the remains of the little ones: field mice, shrews, sparrows.
What Emerges in the Quiet: A Case for Spiritual Accompaniment in a Time of Crisis
While every group is different, I have witnessed so much courage, vulnerability, and true connection (even over Zoom!). Folks from many walks and stages of life come together to deepen in contemplative practice, to engage in quiet presence to the movements of the Divine in their lives, and to accompany one another on the journey to deeper knowing.
I’ve heard some folks question the purpose of contemplative space, given the overwhelming injustices erupting in our world, destabilization by climate change, war, authoritarianism, and violence. Yet this is exactly the time when the power of contemplative practice and collective discernment becomes most potent.
Give to honor the ongoing work of a BTS Center friend
If you’ve benefited from the work of The BTS Center’s Chaplaincy Initiative or other areas of our programming, please consider a donation to Immigration Rapid Response Network, an organization that Karen recommends for their immediate and life-changing work. Your gift will provide a tangible response to urgent basic needs like rental assistance, food, and health care, as well as urgent legal services like legal defense, due process support, and constitutional rights protection.
Q: What does “a climate-changed world” mean to you?
We’ve been saying “a climate-changed world” for a while now, here at The BTS Center. And time and again, when people hear that phrase, something in their heart says, “Yes – that.” Because they know that climate change isn’t a faraway specter. And they know that climate change touches everything. So, we asked some wise friends what “a climate-changed world” means to them.
5 Ways to Deal with Climate Change
There is nothing more dangerous than a newly graduated pastor full of ideas. (I say this from personal experience.)
A seminary professor of mine often said, “If you could just get people to believe [insert theological conviction, ministry framework, or other trend here] then it would change everything for your congregation and the world.”
Keeping the Lights On
I grew up in an American golden age as we wreaked havoc across the world, albeit sometimes with good intentions. Now that havoc, in the same form of dwindling resources, acquisitive enemies, and a government of strongmen and oligarchs supported by overseas agents provocateurs, has come home.
I feel my powerlessness and my complicity.
Immigrant Advocacy is Climate Action
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m just outside the Cumberland County Jail, standing shoulder to shoulder with colleagues and comrades. We’re keeping vigil on a street corner in solidarity with immigrants who are being held in cinderblock cells just beyond our view, having been detained by masked ICE agents and, quite likely, transported hundreds of miles
Rupture & Repair: How I Made the Music Video
That’s the turning point—from confession to vow. It’s more tender than triumphant and is followed by the reminder: “We’re tied to everything.”
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