Year of Sundays

Thank you for visiting A Year of Sundays page. This blog is no longer being updated. Please enjoy the archives. Here are some other blogs you may also enjoy: Religion 101 Fellowship of Saints and Sinners Happy Reading!!!

When Amanda and I started our church tour, I’d had it up to here with vanilla religion. I wanted to take a walk on the wild side (read: nothing Christian), but it turns out that, for a city that prides itself on “keeping weird,” Portland doesn’t have much to offer in that regard. And then…

Yesterday, we went downtown to check out Home PDX. If you want to make head honcho Bruce Arnold, squirm, call their community a church.  The word has so many negative connotations, they’d just as soon not use it. Then again, the PDX Homeys have a different word for everything. Take the word “homeless,” for instance.…

It’s been almost a year since the inspiration for this blog began with a trip to the First A.M.E. Zion Church in North Portland. It was a predominantly black church in a predominantly black neighborhood and what I wrote about it ended up being our most controversial post to date. To this day, it’s also…

One year ago, Amanda and I embarked on our Year of Sundays tour of the Portland church scene. To celebrate, we decided to head back to my roots in North Portland and visit a full gospel church, just like we did in our first week of blogging. That’s how we landed at Emmanuel Temple Church.…

I haven’t written a goddamn (pun intended) thing here since OCTOBER. I’m pretty good at math and that equals nearly three months of silence from this here heathen. I think I’m overdue to at least check in and apologize, but I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to slowly, but surely, explain why I lost…

For decades, Portland’s Southeast Hawthorne neighborhood has been a center for our city’s West Coast counterculture, offering more head shops, thrift stores and local arts and crafts than you can shake a doobie at. You don’t have to share all of its habitants’ political views to see that they have something worthwhile to share with…

After what has been Portland’s bitterest commercial real estate battle since Wal-Mart tried to move into Hayden Meadows five years ago, today, Seattle-based Mars Hill (mega)Church celebrated the grand opening of its new “church plant” on SE 32nd and Taylor. Located in the Hawthorne District, the site is practically ground zero for the local godless…

In an era of secularism and do-it-yourself community, why do churches still exist? I believe a big part of the answer lies in the power of the ineffable. Everybody loves a good mystery. And that’s the one aspect of human experience that churches still hold within their purview. Thus, the lifeblood of a church has…

Hey, dear reader! It’s time for New Year’s resolutions. Amanda’s and mine is to stay in touch with you. It’s been too long! Without getting into too much detail, we’ve agreed that church needs to be returned to its rightful place in our Sunday calendar — right up there with vodka and trashy spy movies…

More from Beliefnet and our partners
Close Ad