Christ
January 23, 2021
Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
November 23, 2020
“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
October 31, 2020
Dwight Moody, the great revivalist, appreciated fire and brimstone. He knew nothing better, he said, than the notion “that Our Lord is coming again” to “take the men of this world out of their stocks and bonds.” As a preacher, he knew it worked, that it moved souls.
May 14, 2020
Making readers like me of George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin highly uncomfortable, a San Diego company has developed a technology to monitor social distance. Already in use in some places, it’s called Active Distance Alert and Monitoring, or ADAM, eerily, for short. The technology maps signals emitted by phones, so that crowded areas like grocery stores […]
March 20, 2020
It may make you feel better to know that even the great Saint Augustine thought this gospel reading a bit long.
March 29, 2020
Gabriel Marcel, French playwright, theatre critic, and philosopher of whom I am fond: he said something once I’ve always believed to be true. He said, “To love…is to say thou wilt never die.”[1] Think about that.
April 5, 2020
There’s a story of a man who after his death found himself at the gate of heaven. Before him stood an angel staring at him silently.
April 9, 2020
To put it very simply, what we do this evening is what faithful people have always done and will until the end of time: since Egypt, since the desert, since Christ, and unto the heavenly Jerusalem. It is why we are here.
April 10, 2020
I always like to sing the Gospel of John on Good Friday, even though it’s long. In exchange I try to preach briefly; at least I try my best.
April 19, 2020
Words, to quote T. S. Eliot, “Crack and sometimes break.”[1] C. S. Lewis called it “verbicide,” the killing of a word by overuse.[2] This can sometimes happen to words: they get worn out and bent, sometimes corrupted and altered beyond their original meaning all together, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.