The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography…

I was reminded of a Madeleine L’Engle story last Sunday because Jake, one of our divinity students, mentioned it in his sermon last Sunday. L’Engle spoke of a couple with a very precocious young daughter who was not thrilled at the prospect of having to share the house with a soon-to-arrive baby brother. Soon after…

I graduated from high school in 1974, which means all my high school dances were before disco took over, which is to say we had live bands. One of my friends was on the committee that picked the bands for our dances. If they could play “Free Ride” and “La Grange” they got the gig….

Over the last several years, and thanks to both inspiration and encouragement from my friends Chris and Kelli, I make handmade cards. I’m not doing much of it right now, but I enjoy looking through the boxes of scrap paper I have to find bits and pieces that collage together into something beautiful. Often the…

I’m in over my head. One chapter into This Is Your Brain on Music and my brain is reeling, trying to take in all the terms and ideas Daniel J. Levitin has crammed into the first chapter. There is enough metaphor and music in those fifty-odd pages to keep me writing all through the night,…

It was somewhere in the middle of the day that I remembered today was Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, meaning tomorrow Lent begins. It feels more like Fast Tuesday: it got here quickly. I know part of the surprise for me is my work schedule keeps me from doing anything during the week but…

One of the things I love about Kate Campbell is she has Elvis songs: not covers, but songs in which he makes an appearance of some sort. She’s not the first to do it, but he does seem to enjoy showing up in her songs. One of her songs Friday night took me back to…

I went to hear Kate Campbell sing Friday night, which is a good thing to do when she comes to your town, or anywhere in driving distance. Her songs are full of faith and food, hope and history – both national and personal, making listening to her a reflective and thoughtful experience. One of her…

It has rained all daywhat snow was left has lostits frozen self in the moisturesaturating the soil at every step I am walking down to my carwith questions lining up likesparrows on the lines of my mindwaiting for you to answer as you do most every afternoonwhen I call to say I am walkingand you…

I love being married to a good preacher. Sunday, she knocked it out of the park – or at least knocked me around a little bit, prophetically speaking. My musings tonight owe much to what she had to say yesterday. I knew going in to church that her sermon was based on the Luke 5…