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
Eleven years ago this year, on a misty September morning in Seattle, I was walking around downtown with my duffel bag, looking for the coffee shop that was calling my name. I would fly back home to Memphis that evening, and it was the first time during my trip to Washington
“Hi! I’m Robyn Banks from Calvary in Memphis.” It seems like such a simple statement, and it’s how I typically introduce myself to new friends at the Episcopal Communicators conference each year. Yet for the past two years, it has been incredibly hard to say. After my husband Bill died in December of 2022,
When I was a young girl growing up in North Carolina, my grandmother often watched the Rev. Billy Graham on television. An Episcopalian by marriage, she kept her Presbyterian roots alive by engaging with the revival aspects of Graham’s preaching. One day, I walked through the living room, where she sat in her rocker. I noticed
I grew up in a family that didn’t make extra stops on road trips. We got up early and drove as far and as fast and as long as we could before we had to stop. So, I missed a lot of roadside markets, scenic overlooks, and unusual tourist