Anthony B. Robinson

Tony is a writer, teacher, speaker and ordained minister (United Church of Christ). He served as Senior Minister of Seattle’s Plymouth Congregational Church for fourteen years. His newest book is Useful Wisdom: Letters to Young (and not so young) Ministers. He divides his time between Seattle and a cabin in Wallowa County of northeastern Oregon. If you’d like to know more or receive his regular blogs in your email, go to his site listed above to sign-up.

Present Tense Perfect — Focusing After COVID

The pandemic and aging have led me to question those not very wise, largely unexamined, assumptions. Things change. Sometimes radically. Things end, including lives. Things don’t always get better in the future. If they do, it’s a bonus not a certainty.

Tired of Paying Taxes? Try Philanthropy!

During the last 40 years, as the rich have gotten richer, and the poor and middle-classes have lost ground or, at best, stayed even, there has also been an explosion of philanthropy and the creation of a boat-load of foundations.

Tim Burgess Explains the Compassion Seattle Amendment. Count me in

There are cities that have taken the approach advocated by Compassion Seattle and gotten to “functional zero.” It can be done. It has been done. It takes resolve and it takes leadership.

Two Minds: What to do about Crime Rate Rise?

We have a hammer problem with policing. As in, “when every problem is a nail, every solution is a hammer.” We have asked the police to do too much. Or to put it another way, we send police to deal with stuff that is better dealt with by other people using other methods.

Back to the Wallowas

“Private Property” was a concept that European immigrants to America brought with them, but which was alien to American Indians. Euro-Americans kept trying to get Indians to “settle down” and farm a particular plot of land. Though some did, it was alien to their culture, at least to the Nez Perce culture.

Pitching In: Building Tiny Homes

These tiny house villages are a small dent in what continues to be a very vexing problem in Seattle, and many other American cities.

Four Northwest Novelists: What They Teach Us About Life and Families

As Jess Walter re-enchants Spokane (no small feat!), Karl Marlantes enchants the woods and the lives of Finns trying to establish themselves in a new land, Southwest Washington.

Terminally Earnest? Hard to “Enjoy the Show”

We want to take seriously matters of justice and human suffering. As we should. But at some point, such seriousness — an excess of earnestness — becomes unbalanced and a little self-important.

The Classics and our need for Ambiguity

We seem now to be in a time when fewer people are willing to consider life’s complexity, and to the truth that “human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity.”

Navigating the Messy In-Between Before the End

Maybe a good time to take stock, to ask ourselves what have I learned? Are there things we have learned to take forward with us on the next leg of the journey? Are there other things that need, now, to be left behind?

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