Archive

The election of 2016 confronted me with a crisis. My actuarial life expectancy has me down to about three-and-a-half presidential campaigns in the years ahead, so as I entered...

In 1964, my maternal grandfather flabbergasted his entire family and astonished parts of the civilized world by casting his ballot for Barry Goldwater for President of the United States,...

Deciding that I needed to get out more, I went looking for a job. I wasn’t expecting an executive position, as the Jim Croce song has it, but it...

My oldest son once spent a summer on staff at a Scout reservation. Underneath his tent platform lived a family of skunks. They would amble by, mama and her...

The man to whom I was pastor, 1988 thereabouts, owned and operated an Amoco service station (long before it became BP Amoco). To his surprise he learned the Evangelical...

For the longest moment driving home two days ago, I was convinced that my next birthday, then just days away, would be my seventieth. I cannot think what trick...

The message the women heard from the “young man” is found in St. Mark (16:5-8). Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome carried their spices to the...

Mulling my Lenten way through the Apostles’ Creed, I have come to see that in defining what we do not believe, we come to know better what we do...

This Lent has me digging through the Apostle’s Creed. Viewed in a certain direction, it not only says what we believe; it lets us in on what we do...

I’m spending time this Lent with the Creed. I hadn’t gotten further than the first sentence before remembering something St. Peter said. “False prophets,” complained Peter, “appeared in the...

Just lately from the forest and after a short time on the savannah, humanity acquired a sense of self. We awakened one morning, so it seems, and if we...

The Tre Ore, the “three hours,” is a Good Friday devotional exercise that marks the last hours of Christ on the cross. The service is marked by prayers, readings,...

For no particular reason except that it has been on my mind, this goes out to lectors everywhere who have been given the wrong instruction manual on proclaiming scripture...

Of the Passover festival in Jerusalem, St. Luke concisely reports, “When the festival was ended, Jesus stayed behind but his parents did not know it” (2:43). Of course they...

The son of David has no name, none that the author of Second Samuel thought to record. Yet this son of David will die for David’s sin. (2 Sam....