Roundup: Cobar, spirituality outside church, Obama, same-sex marriage, Sendak, pilgrimage

Church’s makeover revealed

Cobar’s Uniting Church has thrown its doors open to community groups in need of a meeting place, following a $70,000 makeover.

Growing demand for spiritual directors

Here, as across the nation, spiritual directors find more seeking counsel, solace outside church walls.

Mind, body and spirit: it’s the de-reformation of religion

Church attendance may be declining, but real individual religion has undergone a huge revival in the past 30 years.

Obama supports same-sex marriage

“I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue.”

The Obama same-sex marriage statement

A” religious analysis”.

Where the Wild Things aren’t just Jewish

Sendak, who died this week at age 83, lived out core paradoxes of American Jewish identity.

In Woolf’s footsteps

It is almost the definition of pilgrimage that we follow in the footsteps of others. The Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, the route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—these paths have been traveled by countless pilgrims, been prayed over and wept over. When we step onto those pilgrimage roads we join all those who have traveled them. We join our prayers to their prayers and, in a very real sense, we join our lives to theirs.

Queer Methodist doings

While the UMC continues its ban on granting equal rights to LGBT individuals, other mainline denominations including the United Church of Christ (UCC), Episcopal, Lutheran (ELCA) and Presbyterian (PCUSA) have made strides toward full inclusion of LGBT people.