NEWS

Monday, October 5, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Growing up Catholic, the saints and the concept of saints was embedded into our everyday life. I was baptized at St. Timothy Parish, I received First Communion and was confirmed at St. Benedict Parish, and attended grade school at St. Benedict School, which was served by the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity. By a certain age you could ask any of us for our favorite saint and we could rattle off a name and some basic bio

Monday, September 28, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! We all have our own motivations. One of my friends is motivated, almost beyond anything else, by FOMO or the fear of missing out. She might be ill, have low capacity, or generally not want to be around other humans, yet the fear of what she might miss and the stories she might not be part of is enough to motivate her to do the thing or go to the event. Until relatively recently, I didn’t quite understand FOMO. I was content

Monday, September 21, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! During college I spent a summer in Washington, DC, interning for a large urban congregation. Having grown up in a small town in Southeastern Ohio and being in the middle of attending college on the top of a mountain in rural Tennessee, DC was my first exposure to a city as an adult. I could explore at my leisure and, other than maintaining general safety, go anywhere the metro would take me. Having been directed to the sign

Monday, September 14, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! I was in eighth grade at St. Benedict’s School in Cambridge, OH. I can’t remember when we learned that something tragic had happened, but I remember the moment when our principal, Sr. Miriam, came into the room and whispered something into Mrs. Wilson’s ear. She quickly stopped her lesson and wheeled out the classroom TV so that we could watch the news which was just then making sense of a second plane hitting the World Tra

Monday, September 7, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! It’s no secret that America likes its cowboys. These mythical men who go off to lonely places where they interact only with a few other people, several working dogs, and whatever livestock are under their care. We romanticize their solitude, longing ourselves for those rare moments of silence in our noise-driven lives. Around them we’ve constructed ideals rooted less in reality than in our perception of how we too might achi

Monday, August 31, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! After three weeks on vulnerability and discussions about how I’ve seen myself as a Queer man in relation to masculinity and masculine people, I want to pivot a bit to how media both helps and hurts people construct their ideas of gender. Many of us have heard for decades about the overt effects of media which crop, decrease, airbrush, enlarge, and embellish the features of models and public figures to achieve supposed ideals o

Monday, August 24, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! I can’t remember the first time I saw one of the reports, when it started to become socially acceptable for local news affiliates and the national news to report on domestic violence in the LGBTQIA+ community, but still acceptable as well to televise photos of abuse victims. That domestic violence would pervade the Queer community, and specifically gay male couples blew my mind. Not that I ever saw myself as an aggressor, I si

Monday, August 17, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Last week I named something plainly for the first time really in any space: that what I had called “wanting to be one of the guys” was, underneath, wanting to date them. But that confession and realization is deeper than just identifying a “type” and more about who I am and how I see myself beyond externally objectifying other people. This week I want to peel back another layer, looking further into a reality that I still find

Monday, August 10, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Size matters, some people say, whether it’s the size of your bank account, your social media following, your physical prowess, your sexual anatomy, or the many options men use to compensate for a perceived lack of size in one or more of those areas. Growing up I always marveled, at a distance, about the groups of men who were wealthy, influential, athletically gifted, and likely well endowed, though my experience with that las

Monday, August 3, 2026 “Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.” ~From “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright Happy Monday, my friends! Recently, I discovered that a friend of mine was born and lived the first few years of his life in my hometown. If that wasn’t a fun enough coincidence, it turns out that our parents worked and volunteered together and, after almost 30

Monday, July 27, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Last week clergy from throughout the United States and beyond gathered in Charlotte, NC, for The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries’ (TFAM) 2026 Leadership Conference. Though I had registered as soon as tickets were available, by April I knew that I wasn’t going to be in the financial position to make the trip (airfare, lodging, food, etc. add up quickly!). While friends assured me I could have been more creative about funding t

Monday, July 20, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Following a recent conversation with an acquaintance, he leaned in and said, “Ben, I think your problem is you’re a narcissist.” I tried hard to hear that criticism and tried to understand it and the context in which this person was basing his nonclinical judgment. My first reaction was to be defensive, but then I started to look into clinical definitions of narcissism which sent me down a rabbit hole of considering many of my a

Monday, July 13, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! Now that we’re a few weeks from Pride Month we can reflect on the ups, the downs, and the weird. We can consider what we saw, we heard, and what might have caught us unawares. One of the dynamics I love about the Queer community is our ability, collectively, to find new and to show up at Pride parades and festivals, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t find myself judging the people, outfits, and general tenor of some of the indiv

Monday, June 29, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! The now classic film, Father of the Bride, begins with the lead character, George Banks (played by Steve Martin), narrating, “I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say ‘I do.’ I was wrong. That’s getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition.”[1] I saw that movie a few years after it came out and I was hooked. Hooked, that is, on

Monday, June 22, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! My experience and practice of faith have gone through cycles, emphasizing the stages and experiences of my life and what I needed in those moments. Perhaps the most distinct memory which sums up the time before I returned to full Christian identity was sitting in the meeting house of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Burlington in Burlington, VT. In the next pew over from me sat a lovely woman in all red and a round black

Monday, June 15, 2026 Happy Monday, my friends! If you were following Monday Moments before January 6, 2026, you probably noticed how the essays and reflections came to a rather abrupt end. That wasn’t entirely planned. The last essay I published was never meant to be a farewell, but life has a way of making decisions for us before we have time to make them ourselves. The short version is this: the last several months have been a season of reassessment. LOVEboldly’s financi

Monday, January 5, 2026 Happy Monday and Happy New Year, my friends! When I was in college my friend, Lara (now the Rev. Lara Case Halsey) and I decided that we were going to found a retreat center. It would probably be out in the woods somewhere so we could offer an environment for peaceful reflection as well as respite from the world. Ever the pragmatist, Lara was already thinking of the business plan while idealist me was dreaming of founding a monastery and what the worsh

Monday, December 29, 2025 Happy Monday and Happy Holidays, my friends! There’s a certain magic connected with the winter holidays and often the best place to find it is in the eyes of a child who still believes in Santa Claus. For me that’s my nephew, Jack. On Christmas Eve we continued a tradition started by my brother-in-law’s dad of feasting on Chinese food and then opening presents among the six of us. After presents and dinner, we drove around Urbana looking at Christmas

Monday, December 22, 2025 Happy Monday, my friends! Have you read or watched O. Henry’s classic story “The Gift of the Magi?” A married couple, husband and wife, each decide to buy a special gift for the other for Christmas. The husband sells his pocket watch to buy decorative combs for his wife’s hair. The wife sells her hair in order to buy a proper watch chain for her husband’s watch. The moral of the story is that they each cared so much for the other as to sell their mos

Monday, December 15, 2025 Happy Monday, my friends! I apologize that this present season has caused me to be unable to write and publish Monday Moments as regularly as in the past, but I’m happy to be able to write something for you today. At Blue Ocean Faith Columbus, the church I pastor, we’re reading Living Buddha, Living Christ by the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hahn. As the title implies, Nhat Hahn writes about the similarities and differences between Buddhism and Ch