Thanksgivukkah Special Section : Blue Boat of Youth and Young Adult Ministries

Celebrating the first ever confluence of the major American secular holiday and the annual Jewish Festival of Lights and Feast of Dedication.

Celebrate the confluence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.

My Favorite Links on Race

Race in America is a complex subject, but there are some great tools out there for you to start the conversation. We are called by our faith to work for justice, to create welcoming communities, and to honor our individual gifts, and confronting issues of race and ethnicity sit at the heart of that calling. Below is a hand-selected list my favorite links out there on the interwebs, perfect for jump starting discussions among folks of across all ages: Blogs Code Switch – This NPR blog is one of the best places for new takes on race and culture, particularly the intersection of race with other identities and issues (like gender and class). …
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Questionable Reflections

Humor about Identity… Oil in Water or Watery Wine? Even when acting with intention to be respectful of the many ways in which we are different, we also love to laugh (in fact laughter is considered as being essential to good health). Unfortunately, humor is complex, different for everybody and often at least a little offensive to be effective. In the “documentary series” Funny Business, Rowan Atkinson claims that people can be funny in three ways: by behaving in an unusual way, being in an unusual place, or being the wrong size.[*] We’ve collected some example of Thanksgivukkah humor that tries to straddle the line between tastefully offensive and just not okay. Watch, read, laugh,…
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Gratitude and Grief: Holidays are complicated

Faith Helps When I was a kid my Thanksgiving holidays looked a lot like the seasonal TV commercials. We would gather at my maternal grandparents’ house, all the aunts, uncles and cousins. The food was delicious and plentiful, the family squabbles were bearable and the grown-ups talked and laughed at the big table while us kids ran around playing together. Then, when I was twelve, everything changed. My grandfather died of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day in 1997. Soon it was discovered that my grandmother had Dementia. My mother and her four siblings began struggling over what to do, and conflicts erupted. We stopped celebrating Thanksgiving with that side of the family. And that’s…
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It’s complicated

It feels like a math equation that I just can’t solve: your family’s traditions + my family’s traditions – our budget x are we adults yet = ??? On Monday, my mom texted me about pie, or rather, she group texted me and my two brothers. She was making a list of the types of pie being considered, which sparked a fair bit of conversation as the list was substantial. Thanksgiving is one of those big deal holidays in my family. It is a huge gathering that spans multiple days with food, football, family and always some lively… well, let’s call them debates. It is exhausting. And I love it. But…
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A Super Opportunity for Interfaith Sensitivity

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity … In More Ways Than One! One of the characteristics of being in the minority is that one is seen by society not for what one actually is, but through the lens of the dominant culture. It takes practice for us to see something that is non-dominant with simply our naked eye. This is how our country has seen Hanukkah – through the prism of Christmas. Because they usually occur so close together, it’s been easy for American culture to conflate the two and get the impression that Hanukkah is “the Jewish Christmas.” Retailers help the association along by tossing up some blue-and-white-and-silver along with the red-and-green-and-gold, hoping to assuage non-Christians who…
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