I worked at my local polling station on November 3. After years of intending to sign up to be an election worker, I finally did, was called to serve, and got trained on a Friday afternoon in early October. On Tuesday morning, I packed a bag with a sweater, a water bottle, some
Maya Angelou wrote “When Great Trees Fall” to mark the death of James Baldwin in 1987. In the poem, she moves from images of trees shuddering the landscape as they come down to what reverberates in us when great souls die. In the space of a few stanzas, she walks the reader from a place
The beginning of both the novel True Grit and its 2010 film adaptation by the Coen Brothers features a quotation from Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flee when none pursueth.” I watch this movie every Thanksgiving (a pure coincidence that became tradition), and it has always
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment. John 7:24
My grandmother had something of a green thumb. Her house had all sorts of houseplants that she nurtured and encouraged to grow. One example was a pair of philodendrons that she had growing on either side of the breakfast room window. When she died
I was literally sitting at my laptop writing this week’s blog post when I learned that Dolly Parton had died. And I stopped. Because Dolly Parton has somehow always been here.
I was a little gay Black boy growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, long before I had language for much of what I
After a summer of wonderful conferences and musical experiences, the music department is ready for another year of music-making in liturgies and concerts.
I’m so over the moon about the first Friends of Music concert; I’m literally bonkers! Not since the Boy Choristers from St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 2018 have we had a chance to host
Lately, I’ve been attempting to make stools from a grand old white oak tree that some friends had to have cut down about four years ago. One of the straightest limbs was milled into three-inch planks, which they stacked carefully in a storage unit. A furniture maker counseled us to allow roughly a year
Last week in the New York Times, there was an article about a Bay Area pastor who has taken artificial intelligence (AI) to a level that surprised even me, as someone who can be quite unsurprised about the current state of the world. The Rev. Dr. Justin Lester is a vocal proponent of using AI in church spaces, and
We are knee-deep in summer now. It’s hot and humid. Memorial Day and school seem long past. In Calvary’s music department, we lost the weekly rhythm of Wednesday night dinners and choir rehearsals last month. We won’t have Evensong until next fall.
However, we still have the 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning service to lead! We must still
As boys, my brother Kirk and I figured out that we could talk to each other through the ductwork in our house. I could yell into the grill in the floor of my bedroom and a muffled, hollow version of my voice would reach Kirk in his room with a message about wiffleball