As I write this short note, I am preparing to return to Jackson from New York City to preach at the funeral of a good friend, who died last night. My thoughts are too full of him this morning to write about anything or anyone else. I beg your indulgence as I write a few
This week, I met a young woman who is a very talented singer, actress, and music teacher. She has done phenomenal work in the music and arts communities of Chicago and New Orleans, and even appeared in the movie “Pitch Perfect.” She decided to move back to her hometown of Memphis last year in hopes
Since we have just celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, I’m thinking about spirit-filled people, particularly my beloved friend Margaret Wright Jones, known simply as ‘Be’.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, where we both lived, Be was a brilliant, eccentric, creative woman, the life of every party she attended – and she attended many. But
In a few weeks, our daughter Kate will graduate from college, and she’ll have some decisions to make. When I was her age my biggest decisions were about not entering the workforce in any way that actually required the expensive college degree I’d recently acquired. Decisions that also left time for a few
I have learned that it is important that I not only honor my mom on Mother’s Day but also honor my mother-in-law. Ruthie’s mom Darlene grew up in Weippe, Idaho, a small town where the Nez Perce Indians saved the starving Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805. Darlene is part Cherokee, proud of her Indian
Five centuries or so ago in Japan, a tea master named Yusai Hosokawa was preparing tea for a warlord when a servant dropped an invaluable vessel. The piece broke into five pieces and the warlord raised his hand to punish the servant, but Yusai intervened by singing an improvisation on an ancient romance
For the past twenty-five summers, we have had the same landlord on the coast of Maine: Charles W. H. Dodge, a native son of Maine known to one and all as Charlie.
Frank and I have rented two different houses from Charlie Dodge: The Captain’s Cottage, where we spent twenty summers, and The Playhouse, where we
On Easter Day, for the first time in over a year, I had the privilege of presiding and preaching as a guest at The Church of the Nativity, a beautiful, historic church and vibrant parish in Greenwood MS. Everyone who knows anything about the Delta knows that the region is complicated in many ways. The
Near the end of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2009, we all got up at 5 o’clock one morning to walk the stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa. It is the old street in Jerusalem that is remembered as the path that Jesus took to his crucifixion. Via Dolorosa is Latin
As we begin to imagine a world of less physical separation, and the liturgies of Holy Week draw near (and, yes, since I haven’t been able to find the bandwidth this week…), I thought I’d post an article I wrote several years ago in the Christian Century. They titled it “Bodies at Worship.” I