A confession: I did not get up early to watch the Queen’s funeral. I did scroll through the pictures and videos later in the day (a second confession: I wanted to see what Kate and Meghan wore). So, this is not a blog about that beautiful and precise liturgy; it’s not a blog
Wednesday afternoons were a busy time at our family business, McLain & Barnes Hardware. That was the time when the Orgill Brothers truck arrived from Memphis, with all sorts of goods for us kids working summer jobs to inventory, price, and prepare to sell in the coming days.
In my teaching days, we shared the story of Paul Brand with our students – a mostly unknown doctor who spent most of his career studying leprosy and treating people with this disease. As it turns out, it is not just a disease of the Biblical era; leprosy still afflicts people around the
As these last couple of years have put all of us more in touch with our mortality, Ruthie and I have been more intentional about crossing items off on our “bucket list” – things that are important for us to do before we die (“kick the bucket”). A few of those have been going to
Recently I heard a podcast host ask a science fiction writer named Ted Chiang what he thought about superheroes. Neither science fiction nor superheroes are subjects that interest me much. But Ted Chiang’s response did.
He said he has several problems with superheroes, the biggest one is this. A question he asks
I was a student for twenty-one years. And I was a teacher for fifteen years. August brings its own particular and peculiar blend of delight, hope, anxiety, and curiosity. I love clean calendar pages, the smell of new books, nametags (which I actually think we should wear in perpetuity), and fresh starts. I
During my time in Covid quarantine this week, I have been reading Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times by Rabbi David Wolpe, one of our Lenten Preaching Series preachers for our 100th anniversary in 2023. This week, I especially identify with his thoughts about exile. Rabbi Wolpe writes, “Exile is the prerequisite for
Everyone, who thinks about the larger mainstream church in America today, ponders the question of why our numbers keep dropping. Though statistics vary, in one big poll from 2000 to 2018, the number of Americans who claim membership in church dropped from 69% to 52%. Whatever the precise number, it is a big drop. Not
“The harshest winter finds in us an invincible spring,” wrote philosopher Albert Camus.
I have turned to those words for quite some time when feeling overwhelmed by buffeting emotions that threaten to throw me completely off course. After the last six months or so of senseless outbursts of violence at home, a heartrending war in Ukraine,
It’s a lot. It’s too much, really.
Our minds were not meant to process all the information that is now flooding our days. Our hearts seem not quite large enough to fit all the cares that cry for our attention.
Gun violence and the simultaneous weakening of gun safety regulations. The