I’ve continued my journey into The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us over the last couple of days and read something this morning that made me think of our lenten journey. Let me explain. In a chapter called “Ignoring the Content, Celebrating the Style,” James Pennybaker makes two points in...
Read more →My gift for Valentine’s Day — along with a box of SpongeBob SquarePants chocolates — was a trip to the Regulator to pick out a book. On the table of recent and notable books I found The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us by James W. Pennebaker. He is the...
Read more →Last Sunday night, our church offered the last of a three week series called Forgetting but Not Forgotten: Alzheimer’s and Faith, the final gathering focusing on congregational responses to dementia. Lisa Gwyther the director of the Duke Alzheimer’s Family Support Program began the session by reciting a line from an Antonio Machado poem: traveler,...
Read more →Last Saturday night, we went to dinner with friends. The dinner was good and the decor was cool enough, but it felt like the owners were working on a concept they hoped would become the next Cheesecake Factory. I don’t want sound as though all I’m doing is taking easy shots at an easy...
Read more →Sunday was a busy day. I began with a birthday breakfast for Rachel, my mother-in-law, moved on to church (a Communion Sunday), to our congregational annual meeting, to celebratory frozen yogurt (for Rachel), to grocery shopping, then food preparation for our series on Faith and Alzheimer’s, and then home to a family dinner of...
Read more →I love my wife for walking out of church this morning. She began our worship, you see, by using a song they sang on the 2012 Freedom Ride to help us figure out a way to allow us room to deal with our grief over Sandy Hook in our service. So we sang, I...
Read more →Things started happening early here on West Trinity Avenue this morning. We were out the door at 6:30 to get Ginger to the bus for the 2012 Freedom Ride, then I came home in time to meet Jenny, our vet, who took Gracie with her for the day to see how the little dog...
Read more →By the time most of you read this, Ginger will have received her Christmas present. She will be on a bus headed for Birmingham, Alabama as a part of the 21st Century Freedom Ride, which has been organized by a group here in Durham. They are riding from here to Atlanta and then to...
Read more →As many evenings as we can, Ginger and I take a walk around our neighborhood, which, in our case, is downtown. Old North Durham sits just a few blocks north of the center of the city, not far from the Farmers’ Market Pavilion and a bunch of old warehouses and abandoned buildings that are...
Read more →For the last twenty Advents I have been a prophet. My calling began at First Congregational Church of Winchester, UCC where Ginger was serving as Youth Minister. We lived in Charlestown, which was eight miles away and didn’t have a car. I was teaching full time and going to grad school full time to...
Read more →