About Jim Burklo

My name is Jim Burklo and I am trying to understand who I am and what I am meant to be and do in this spectacular, precarious, and wondrously strange world.  I muse about the human/divine condition quite a bit.  So welcome to my "Musings".  I would enjoy seeing yours, as well-- whether or not they are in response to my own.  So send them on.

I am grateful to be married to the alluring, creative, soulful love of my life, Roberta Maran.  I'm grateful and humbled to be the father of Liz, the step-dad of Nick and Josie, and the grandfather of Rumi, each a fascinating universe of unique proclivities and possibilities.  Roberta and I live in Mill Valley, California, in a little cabin in the woods.  Every day I take a walk on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais.  Many of my musings begin to congeal on these walks.

I'm on the national executive council of The Center for Progressive Christianity.  My new book, BIRDLIKE AND BARNLESS: Meditations, Poems, Prayers, and Songs for Progressive Christians (St. Johann Press), will come out in 2008.  My first published book, OPEN CHRISTIANITY (www.risingstarpress.com), is a primer on the progressive Christian movement; it is still in print, now through St. Johann Press.  I write and speak around the country on behalf of this movement. 

I am an ordained United Church of Christ pastor and writer.  I just completed a 4.5 year stint as the pastor of Sausalito Presbyterian Church.  Until 2003 I was the minister of College Heights United Church of Christ in San Mateo, and also the ecumenical Protestant campus minister at Stanford University.  Before these jobs, until 1993, I was the founder and then the executive director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, an interfaith agency serving homeless people.  I graduated from San Francisco Theological Seminary in Marin (1979).  My undergraduate degree was from the University of California, Riverside.  At birth I lived in Los Gatos, CA, grew up in a small town in Ohio, and went to high school in Santa Cruz, CA.

The older I get, the more I know about how little I know.  I'm increasingly giddy in the face of it all.  Why does my heart ache with joy when red-orange sunlight sears the mountaintop?  How dare I tell my wife that I love her, when I barely comprehend the sacred mystery between us?  Who am I to preach and write about the divine, when I hardly fathom what it is to be human?  Bear with me, believe with me, hope with me, endure with me as we muse about it together....