I earned how to read the funny papers from my Dad. That’s what he called the comics. One of the characters who lived in black and white in those days was Dagwood Bumstead, husband of Blondie, and lover of the biggest sandwich you ever saw—everything stacked high, one layer on top of the other. I…

In a staff meeting recently, we were discussing ways to improve our daily processes—ways to make things more effective and, well, easier on everyone. E-mail is our primary means of communication, since not everyone is in the same office. We all get lots of e-mail. In the course of the discussion, one person suggested that…

I think it was the early Nineties when I first started keeping a Lenten Journal as a spiritual practice. It was before I had e-mail or any kind of web access. For the first few years, I would choose one friend and write him or her an entry everyday without their even knowing I was…

I’m learning to drink my coffee black. As far back as I can remember, I have put cream in my coffee. I have often said that if the day came that the doctor told me I couldn’t use half and half, I’d cash in my chips right there. But the doctor wasn’t the one who…

Sunday morning I got up early and drove about an hour down I-95 to hear Rachel Held Evans preach at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was speaking as a part of their very cool Courage and Faith series. Her sermon came from the story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9….

I didn’t write over the weekend because I made a trip back to Durham, North Carolina to take care of some business and see some friends. I am grateful that the necessity of the former offered the gift of the latter. Since I had some things that needed to get from Guilford to Durham, I…

I read some more of Howard Thurman’s Deep is the Hunger on the train to New York this morning, and found myself trying to imagine what he sounded like by the tone of his writing, which has a centering nature about it. I called my friend Kenny tonight, who studied with Thurman in the late…