Yesterday morning I went to breakfast with a room full of people who make me proud to live in Durham. The group was the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, which is a profound collection of folks who are working diligently to end violence in our town, or as they say, “Our mission is...
Read more →One of the small memories of my senior year at Baylor is sitting talking to a friend in the Student Union Building as people walked by. Those who recognized us would inevitably ask, “How are you?” as they passed. My friend looked at me and said, “No one really wants to wait for the...
Read more →One of my morning rituals is to read the Writer’s Almanac. When we lived in Massachusetts, in played on WBUR as I was going to work; here in Durham I read the text on the website. Besides a daily dose of poetry, Garrison Keillor also mentions two or three significant birthdays or anniversaries. Today...
Read more →“Where Are We Going” Luke 4:1-13 A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham NC February 17, 2013 In these weeks since Epiphany, we have journeyed through Jesus’ baptism, his first miracle, and his sermon in his hometown of Nazareth. This morning we come to the story of the Temptations. (Jeremy, our accompanist,...
Read more →I’ve loved the Magi since I was a kid. I don’t know if it was their exotic nature, or that they were chasing stars across the desert, or that they were a sort of odd addition to the whole manger scene, but they have continued to keep my attention. As I learned to love...
Read more →One of the things I miss about living in Marshfield was learning to tell time by the tides. The tide came and went twice a day, but never in sync with the clock. The tides felt a rhythm rather than a ticking. They followed the moon, the earth’s turning, the breathing of the oceans....
Read more →I saw Joy dressed as a postal worker tenaciously attempting to infect everyone in line up against Impatience in the form of a woman still in her workout clothes complete with jewelry and then I stood behind Clumsy or so she seemed — dressed in faux fur and fumbling at the self-serve machine I...
Read more →It’s December in Durham, which means we have no idea what the weather is going to do from day to day. Right now, it might as well be May; tomorrow may feel like, well, December. Who knows. As I sat in our kitchen this morning, trying to decide whether or not to turn on...
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...
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