Here’s a bit of trivia for you: In ancient Roman construction, there was often a stone placed at the threshold of a door that one would have to traverse in order to enter or exit a building. That stone was called a limen. I tell you that because the word lies behind this year’s trendiest […]
Allow me some magic. Some dark, mammalian creature moves swiftly across the field outside my window at middle distance between the treeline and me. It traces a smooth, straight line across my field of vision, just far enough away in the early dawn light to be indistinct. Could Maxwell, the neighbor cat, be that far […]
When I took a part-time job as a disc jockey for a country music station in 1984, there were some hard and fast rules. You always time your hour to get in the ads and mark them in the log. Songs in heavy rotation had to cycle through at least once during your shift. And […]
If you’re a leader in a typical church struggling with the challenges of pandemic and shrinking resources, you may pick up Nona Jones’s new book in hope and set it down halfway through in despair. The first half of her title From Social Media to Social Ministry:A Guide to Digital Discipleship catches the eye of […]
“Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book.” Carson McCullers is describing a central character in her remarkable debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and […]
Trees are beautiful things, but they are terrible writers. The problem is they have no sense of timing that a human can relate to. 500 years is nothing to a great tree. But try pacing a potboiler to that timescale. The problems of arboreal authorship become apparent halfway in to Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 […]
We always thought we were ahead of the times, but the times caught up with us. Two weeks ago we got the news that FaithLink was no more. I may have been the longest-serving writer still in the stable. Twenty years ago, when I began writing for this curriculum piece “connecting faith and life as […]
FaithLink, the faith and currents event curriculum of the United Methodist Publishing House, just published its final issue. I’ll have more reflections on the loss of this venerable resource in a later post, but here’s a link to the essay from that last issue, which was picked up by Ministry Matters. After 20-some years writing […]
When I read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to a group, I generally start by saying, “Don’t worry about getting it all on first hearing. Just let the words flow over you and see how you feel.” That’s how I started on him, though tremendously helped by a book in the Augsburg Fortress 40 Day […]
“As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. (178)” –Kathleen Norris, Dakota Returning to Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography almost three decades after it was written, I tried to decide what made it so powerful for me when I was a […]
