I do a fair amount of listening to country music, but I’m always a little gun shy of my radio this time of year (no pun intended) because the closer we get to the fireworks the more often they play Toby Keith singing about putting a boot up anyone’s ass who disagrees with our government,…

“It was a dark and stormy night.” So goes the opening sentence to Snoopy’s always-in-process novel back in the Peanuts days. He sat at his typewriter, ready to be the next great American novelist and that was the best he could do. “It was a dark and stormy night.” George Bulwer-Lytton used the sentence to…

“Forget about fairy tales,” she saidas we entered Wolf Hollow.“They will make you frightenedof the wolves,” she said, as thoughwe were looking at docile dogsthrough two layers of tall fence. Gracie our youngest, descendantof the wolves I’m told, is frightenedby the early freedom thunderof fireworks a couple of blocks away.She shakes as though she mightwear…

I am more and more convinced that time doesn’t move in a line. Even as I make that statement, I can recall one of my seminary professors waxing eloquent about the linear view of time being something that made the Judeo-Christian worldview stand apart from the others: history was going somewhere rather than going in…

One of the things I have been turning over in my mind for the last couple of days is this post from Back Road Journey: This past Sunday in worship we were asked the question, “What is the opposite of war?” and before I could even think of the standard response of “peace,” we were…

once upon a timeor even below onethere was an asylumsomewhere hereon asylum hillthere had to beeverything is namedafter it: asylum thisasylum that all the doorsand windows upand down the streethave bars to keeppeople out, not inlike the old dayswhen you knew whowas crazy up hereon asylum hill our high schoolinmates are runningevery chance they geton…

I’m off to Hartford on our church’s youth mission trip and will be back on Thursday. I don’t know how often I will get to post in the days ahead, but I’ll do my best. Peace,Milton

Since I grew up in Africa, one of the American phenomena I have struggled to understand is the Yard Sale. In Nairobi or Lusaka, the thought of selling stuff we were no longer using made no sense; we gave it away to any number of folks around us who needed it and more. We weren’t…

when darkness falls outsideand inside at the endof a pretty good dayI have turned on the musicI know – songs that havelighted many nightswith the slide of fingersalong steel stringsfingers picking a patternof sorrow and sadnessas comforting as the wind and as old as my childhoodafternoons spent sittingin the grass trying to makemy fingers move…

Summer arrives in a few minutesannounced only by the estival breezesand the clacking of the woodenblinds in our room. The sun filledthe room with light just after fivethis morning and won’t retreatuntil nearly ten. This is the longest day. Somewhere around ten I watchedthe taillights of the Wrangerdisappear around the corneras you left for a…