As I remember we sang a lot about tin soldiers even as our friends and brothers drew lots to see who would wade through rice paddies and not come homeor come home dead inside I was thirteen the springof the Kent State shootingstin soldiers and Nixon cominggo ahead and hate your neighborthe image of the…

In my new vocational incarnation, I am reading more, both books I’ve had stacked around for awhile and those I’m reading again with students. My tenth grade class is reading one of my favorite novels, Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, which tells the story of Stephen Kumalo’s search for his lost son. Kumalo is…

I preached this morning at our church here in Durham as the culmination of a study we did on the Book of Job. This is the text of my sermon, “The Last Word.” Only four Saturdays have passed since a group of us gathered to study the story of Job together, and yet way more…

We sat at the oyster bar at Felix’s in the middle of a N’awlins afternoon,eating fried food and listening to the Chi-Lites, the O’Jays, even Harold Melvin and the Blue Notessing Seventies soul as the smiling shucker offered up oysters and opinions, both free of cynicism. From there, we wandered through the shutters and smells…

Ginger and I leave in the morning to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary on the twenty-first, and we’re going to do it in New Orleans, thanks to our friend Jay. So I offer a little traveling music, that is to say, some of the songs we’ve carried with us in our wonderful journey so far….

adjectives attach like grammatical barnaclesexplanatory sidecarsdirecting distinctionsguitars didn’t need them until someone founda Fender and plugged inso we pulled outacoustic and electricto state the obvious writing goes backas far as the storiesand then one day somescheduler needed a name for a course and wrote Creative Writinglegitimizing the mundaneand discounting wordsit’s all creating whetherwriting of stars…

I have to admit I didn’t know it was a hymn the first time I heard it. I was in tenth grade, living in Fort Worth, Texas during our year of leave from the mission field (as they used to say) and completely taken with American popular radio. It was the year of “American Pie”…

Through all of our years in Massachusetts, we had more than one Easter that left the children hunting for eggs in the snow. North Carolina offers warmer climes, but snow of a different sort: we’ve been knee deep in pollen. And I’ve sneezed and sorted and snuffled all week long. In my mind’s yellow haze…

we stood in the columbariumwell after sunriseto speak of resurrectionwith the names of thosewho share death in commonas our backdropthe whistle of treesour soundtrack andthe promise of pancakeswaiting for us inside as we retold the story I heardthe passive verb:the stone was rolled awayas though coming backto life were as easy assliding a door to…

On one of their early albums, Simon and Garfunkel sang “Silent Night” while a recording of the Seven O’Clock News played at the same time. (You can hear it here.) The song began playing in my head as I sat down to write, I think, because of the way my day went. My Holy Saturday…