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Can we reopen this discussion? Experts tell me that with its multiple hapax legomenas, Ugaritic influences, and lack of interest in Pentateuch, this conversation might be the oldest in the Hebrew Bible.  So how about it, because my eyes haven’t seen. Let’s start with your rhetorical questions, beautiful BTW. Where was I? A thought, in the…

I’ve been having lunches with my son these last few weeks of a school Each Thursday  Communion– celebrated with Whataburgers or Chipotle Burritos and consecrated by discussions of college choices, friendships, and our favorite TV shows The gift that growing grief gives, a focus in the present, is more pronounced each week One week he…

I don’t know, I’ve only been at this for a short time.   By short time i mean five years. By at this i mean I read a few each morning and have tried writing two, now three, myself. I have no formal training, so I breeze past words like stanza, structuralism, and synecdoche, but I…

 I’ve spent the last few weeks reading op-eds, tributes, and other editorial takes on Pope Francis.  He was revered and mourned far beyond the Catholic church.  That is clear.  What’s less clear is the status of Pope Francis’s legacy.  That he was a voice for the marginalized is beyond dispute.  He was also a voice…

This last fall I went on a spiritual journey that I had not been on before.  Accompanied by Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, I read and considered that the God, and I’m not sure if I should capitalize that usage or not, I had worshiped my whole life might not be real.  Or might…

does God really share Godself?   are we made participants in the divine Nature?  there was that one time  on my knees using the seat of the chair as my coloring table next to my childhood crush Sarah, I filled in Jonah’s sandals with a brown Crayon all the while my father, the pastor, worked the…

Almost an hour after I had fallen asleep my eldest daughter woke my wife and I from our vacation property rental bed.   “Mabel keeps gagging and isn’t responsive”  My faculties are subdued if not compromised by 100 mg of Seroquel, a mood disorder drug I’ve been taking for almost two years.  My groggy calculations based…

Baby Names Book There would seem to be a basic logic about the way relationships work that suggests the more opposite you are, the better it works.  Nothing about the human condition can be reduced to an axiom, but the wisdom in this case does seem to be conventional.  Yin and Yang.  North and South…

Lottery Ticket We open our Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  That was a holiday shakeup for me when I got married.  My family of origin opened presents on Christmas eve.   The compromise that has elbowed its way into our tradition is a larger extended family gathering that includes a White Elephant gift exchange on…

Headstones Three days before Thanksgiving our family gathered for an occasion of mild emotional stress.  Crouton the hamster died of complications due to something mysterious.  The girls, who were the hamster’s legal guardian in the sovereign nation of the Carney family household, reported that Crouton displayed cold-like symptoms the day before.  I’m suspicious of this…