Ephraim Radner

One of the most haunting images I know of comes from the last days of James ­Simon, a German Jewish composer who perished at Auschwitz. Having survived ­Theresienstadt, he and others were sent off to their final destination. Witnesses say that the last time they saw him, Simon was waiting for the . . . . Continue Reading »

“The mountains are my church.” So said an old parishioner of mine who tended cattle in the Wet Mountains of Colorado. He meant this hackneyed comment (you can still see it on bumper stickers) to explain his infrequent Sunday visits. I recalled it as I embarked with my family on a long December . . . . Continue Reading »

A few years ago, I visited Albi, a small town in southern France famed for its Cathedral of Saint Cecilia. Constructed of the rose-colored brick typical of the region, the building was begun in the thirteenth century, about a hundred years after the Albigensian Crusade against the region’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Americans know little of Voltaire. French high-schoolers, by contrast, know him the way we once knew Thoreau and Whitman, before social justice eclipsed history as the rationale for our syllabi. Like America’s Liberty Bell, Voltaire’s tomb in Paris’s Panthéon is still visited by school groups . . . . Continue Reading »

Gertrude Stein characterized the young men and women emerging from the wreckage of World War I as the “lost generation.” I had Stein’s words in mind while reading Vera Brittain’s memoir, Testament of Youth, published in 1933. The book is a classic of the period, written from the . . . . Continue Reading »

Renewed theology and theological scholarship awaits its form from among those whose wisdom is not yet mature. Continue Reading »

We have argued now for weeks about whether we can celebrate the Eucharist as a people; and now we must show the larger civil society that it is possible to do so. Continue Reading »

The uncertainties of the present are the building blocks of hope, not its detritus. Continue Reading »

This is a time to turn to God, to reckon God’s gifts, to tend and cherish common responsibilities and the life given through birth, children, and parents.  Continue Reading »

Perhaps there is something that Catholics and Anglicans can learn from each other about “synodality.” But we have to be serious about what and who we are talking about. Continue Reading »