James Talarico

He baptized me when I was two years old.

And he's a unique, I think, religious leader and thinker and got in trouble a lot.

When I was in elementary school, he was ordaining gay and lesbian clergy.

He was blessing same-sex unions, which now doesn't seem controversial, but certainly back in the 90s.

Well, in some traditions, it certainly is.

That's true.

But I think it's hard to remember just how controversial universally it was, how radical and dangerous it was.

And we almost lost our church because of those actions by our minister and our congregation.

And the National Presbyterian Church put him on trial.

And so these early memories were kind of seared into my brain.

And so I was brought up in a very countercultural faith that didn't sound like everything I heard at school or at work, in the media.

So I feel like I was given a really healthy tradition and one that has worked for me, partly because Dr. Jim, my pastor, always said that

religion shouldn't lead to itself religion should lead you deeper into your own life and to me that is such a gift that you can give a young person can you say more about what that means to you yeah so you know i think for christianity i'll just speak about my tradition the genius

the miracle of Christianity, is not the claim that Jesus is God.

It's that God is Jesus, meaning Jesus helps us understand the mystery.

A mystery can't help us understand Jesus.

So this idea that ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you want to define God, that that somehow looks like this humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century.

someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority.

That to me is such a revolutionary idea and it leads you to challenge organized religion.

The gospel just inherently tries to break out of some of these religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself.