Congress passed a bill yesterday making lynching a hate crime–a hundred and fifty years late. As the bill states, “At least 4,742 people, predominantly African Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968,” and so, in the election year 2020, Congress finally said lynching was a hate crime. Emmett Till was…
I’ve been thinking all day of how to meet you here, as my Lenten Journal begins for another year. Tonight I was looking through some notes and found this quote from James Baldwin in an article in Brainpickings. Once people know what they know, they make the unconscious assumption that they were born knowing what…
Last summer, Ginger and I got to go to Dyersville, Iowa and visit the farm where Field of Dreams was filmed. The baseball diamond is still there, between the house and the cornfield. We were two of only a handful of people walking around, so we played catch, me on the pitcher’s mound and she…
My family moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia in 1957. Back then, that required sailing on a passenger freighter from New York to Beira, Mozambique, which took thirty-two days. I turned one in the course of the journey from Texas to Africa. None of us had much idea of what we were in for. Though Southern…
A friend gave me a book for Christmas–One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. Because I received several books for Christmas, I didn’t get to start it until last Sunday morning. As I read the dustcover (you should always read the dustcover), I learned the volume I held was a posthumous collection, put together…
Last Thursday night Ginger and I drove up the Hartford to meet our friend Christy and watch Baylor play UConn in basketball. The Huskies, perhaps the most famous women’s basketball program in the country, had won ninety-eight home games in a row. The Bears broke their streak, and didn’t wait until the final shot to…
I had to learn how to get angry. My father grew up in a house where the weather of the family was one storm after another. He was determined my brother and I would not grow up in that kind of climate and so he and my mother made a point of not yelling. What…
The word magos can mean “a magus, sage of the magician religion, magician, astrologer, wise one;” but, probably because it was King James who authorized the version that has most affected our telling of Jesus’ birth, we have come to call them the Three Kings. They make one appearance in Matthew 2, right on the…
I preached this morning at North Haven Congregational Church. Here is what I had to say. ______________________________________ For a number of years now, I have marked the end of the year with a song by Counting Crows that begins a long december and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the…
This is a first. I have never made up a cocktail before. It grew out of a conversation with a friend–over the poetry of Padraig O’Tuama, as I remember, and she said to me, “Why don’t you make up a cocktail called ‘A Thin Place’?” I accepted the challenge. A thin place is an image…