Tomorrow, April 21, 2020, is our thirtieth wedding anniversary. In the course of our marriage we have lived in five cities and four states, Ginger has served four UCC churches, we have had eight residences, eight Schnauzers, and I have had five different careers. I have lost track of how many people have lived with…
I am still getting used to Sundays being a day with space. Almost thirty years of being married to a pastor has me well-conditioned to Sunday being a work day, even if it’s not my job. But for the last six Sundays, we have had time to be together for meals, for walks, for whatever…
I started reading the Gospel of Mark yesterday as a part of my morning reading time. I got a copy of David Bentley Hart’s new translation and took it as an invitation to dive back into the Gospels once again. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher. In his introduction to…
We have a standing joke around our house: Ginger likes blow-up movies and I like movies where nothing happens. What I mean is I like character-driven movies. I like characters. Two of my favorite TV shows with great characters are not happening this week. Schitt’s Creek, which is a Canadian Broadcasting Company show that played…
Tonight’s post is a continuation of my occasional series, “Cookies with Stories.” As I have mentioned more than once most of my recipes come from my cookie-baking days in Durham, North Carolina. Tonight’s cookie is the first one with a Guilford story attached to it. We moved to Connecticut for Ginger to become co-pastor of…
My family and I left Africa for good on my sixteenth birthday. I turned one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Africa, so there was some poetry in our departure, but it was hard on all of us. We all thought we were going to be in Africa for…
It has been my practice over the last several years to sort of disappear from these pages after Lent. My absence has never been intentional, but it has been consistent. As the reality of our unfortunate isolation became more apparent, I decided several week ago that I would keep writing every night on beyond Easter,…
A Holy Saturday Christian. I learned the term from Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest and Hebrew Bible Scholar who teaches at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth. In a “pastoral letter” she wrote to her students after they had dealt with particularly violent biblical texts she said, I am a Holy Saturday preacher. I wake…
photograph one of the photographs of Jesus I keep in the wallet of my mind is of him looking out over Jerusalem. the sun is burning the last bits of Judean blue out of the Palestinian sky, making room for the night. the long reaches of the last light catch the tears running down his…
Order an entree from an Italian restaurant in New England and it will come with a side of pasta. I don’t mean the entree will be served over pasta. That’s a pasta dish. I mean any entree comes with a side of pasta. Night before last, we ordered from Centro Pizza, one of our regular…