Affirmation is life-giving. When I was teaching high school, I started putting stickers on vocabulary quizzes (and then on other papers and tests) for good grades. The kids went nuts over them. I was teaching junior Honors Brit Lit and they were clamoring for Sponge Bob stickers. I know how they feel. I started back…

In the weight of these times, I found myself looking for a little relief tonight. And, since we are in the waning days of National Poetry Month, I offer yet another poem. Naming the Animals “Our job is to name the animals,” she said.“All of them?” he asked.“Why? Where do you have to be?”She smiled….

Yes, I know I’m posting a couple of times today. I wanted to talk about the blog tour, but the thing most on my mind is the Global Days for Darfur initiative taking place this week around the world thanks to the Save Darfur Coalition. The volume of voices calling for significant action to save…

There’s a new site worth visiting (actually a new version of something already going pretty well called The High Calling of Our Daily Work, which looks at what it means to be called to our vocation whether or not that means we are professionally spiritual. They have some great stuff. I particularly like the categories…

We are more together than we know,how else could we keep on discoveringwe are more together than we thought? — Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage” Ginger and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary yesterday. We both had full workdays: I had three functions and she had a funeral, a wedding, and a fiftieth wedding…

I’m thankful I woke up this morning late enough to miss NBC’s airing of the video of Cho Seung-Hui that he mailed before he started shooting people in Blacksburg. I don’t want to see it. I know I don’t need to. What I did read were the anonymous comments from one angry person to Tracy’s…

I found a new blog recently called Poetry Thursday. They have all kinds of cool stuff — columnists, writing prompts, thoughts on poetry, and poems themselves. One of the posts this week talked about the villanelle, a very strict poetic form that requires not only a specific rhyme scheme, but also the repetition of particular…

Besides trying to figure out how to create another sidebar on my blog, I spent a good part of the evening reading how various folks have responded to the killings at Virginia Tech. My heart aches for the families and friends of those who were killed, for all the VT students who never imagined their…

We wanted to be a partof the grand equation:a nasty nor’easter,an astronomically high tide,a new moon —so we set out in the darkand the cold, blowing raintoward the sea wallto see the storm.The wind drove us home. This morning we could seethe flooded roadfrom our kitchen window.“Why do you thinkthey call it Canal Street?”she asked,…

One of the things about Jesus’ healing miracles is he asked different things of different people. Sometimes he simply said, “You’re healed” and that was that. On other occasions, he asked questions first or told them to do something. Jesus healed one blind man by putting mud on his eyes and then telling him to…