Forty-nine years ago, on July 29, 1974, eleven women were ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. There are eleven particular stories to tell about these women, and more stories to tell about the three bishops who chose to lay hands on their heads and bring them into the priesthood.
With all due respect to Oscar Wilde who smugly opined, ‘conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative,’ let’s talk about the weather we’ve been having lately: Not just the insufferable heat and humidity in Memphis, but also the bizarre weather that has befallen the coast of Maine where I have been
Dwell is one of my favorite words. It sounds a little old-fashioned, or maybe like a word from a fairy tale, conjuring a hidden home in the woods. In the Bible, it’s repeated all the way through from dwelling in tents to sparrows dwelling near the altar to Christ dwelling in the world
Do you know about the Merlin app? If not, I have a wonderful tip for you. Merlin is a free global bird guide for birds in the US, Canada, and Europe, the perfect companion for summer travels as well as staycations. I learned about it this spring from my friend Barbara, a seasoned naturalist.
In our Praying the Psalms class on Sunday mornings, we have discussed two of the images often depicted in the Psalms – the pit and the wings. The pit is the place in which people are put to render them null and void. It is the place where we are reduced to powerlessness. It is
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the word flourish. This morning, I finished up a stool I made with a scrap of cyprus, the last bit of several thick planks I retrieved from my friend Robert’s shop on South Main before he sold it to a developer and moved to Franklin. The board was pretty
These words, attributed to Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French philosopher, author, journalist, and recipient of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize in Literature, have seen me through many a ‘harsh winter.’
I first read them on a small scroll hanging in a bookstore, and since the scroll was for sale, I bought it and nailed it on
Hanging in my office is an icon of Mary Magdelene holding a red egg. I love it. Partly because for years my mom participated in an annual icon-writing workshop at Holy Communion, and this icon is a gift from that class. Also, Mary
Here’s a story told by Wendell Berry in an essay called “The Burden of the Gospels”:
In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a ‘thief-catcher.’ As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke
by the Rev. Paul McLain
We are hurting, angry, and reeling from the senseless shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, resulting in the deaths of 3 children and 3 adults, as well as the life of the shooter. We were already reeling from the deaths of 26 people in the storms and tornados in our region over the weekend that