The kids have spent about 75 percent of their waking hours this past week screaming. Esther is teething and snuffly, insisting on being held constantly, and Ransom is just a bear. I don’t even have to mind the varmints during work hours, mostly, because Nathaniel does, but it still frays my mind and nerves. That’s a cover-up for the truth:… Read more →
We three galloped up to Nowhere, Michigan, last weekend, to attend a seminar in Russell Kirk’s library on the Catholicity of Hamlet. I read and write buckets all day, but 99 percent of it nonfiction, policy, and task-oriented (as in, email). So it was a great joy and relief to spend whatever time Ransom would allow in thought about complex… Read more →
Welcome to the fellowship of community friendship Facebook page! We’re so excited to rethink church with you today to aim for something much more like your favorite jeans: comfortable and hip! Never mind original sin, reverence, and piety—outmoded concepts if we ever saw them—instead, set your sights on innovation, excitement, and realizing your true self. Jesus was nothing like an… Read more →
I’m on this awesome email list called Freecycle, where people trade and give away rather than throw away their old stuff. You post what you have, people reply, you pick one, and the happy new owner comes to take it away. Looks like No. 2 got something very special for Christmas this year.
Nathaniel and I have several times remarked to each other how having a new baby has taught us much about how God must see us. For example, Ransom loves to eat. He thus often zooms from zero to panic the instant he decides he’s hungry. Unfortunately, I am not Superman and cannot tear off my shirt in a corresponding instant…. Read more →
A good friend and I have brought up an issue concerning babies and souls in private email conversation, and I’d like to reprint my thoughts on it here. She wrote that she believes God doesn’t intervene in human lives beyond having set up scientific laws and natural processes that now continue, including that the timing of a baby’s birth doesn’t… Read more →
Some Friday humor and parting thoughts on a weekend I hope will take us to the beach despite a hurricane: “There’s only one way to protect our rights: Register to vote.” Hmm. Trent, Nathaniel, and I edged into church time over dinner this Wednesday, stuck in conversation on the uniquely American—and, I think, uniquely wrong—concepts tied to Manifest Destiny. This… Read more →
Some Friday humor and parting thoughts on a weekend I hope will take us to the beach despite a hurricane: “There’s only one way to protect our rights: Register to vote.” Hmm. Trent, Nathaniel, and I edged into church time over dinner this Wednesday, stuck in conversation on the uniquely American—and, I think, uniquely wrong—concepts tied to Manifest Destiny. This… Read more →
Pardon me while I opine briefly on religion. This United Church of Christ pastor’s first sentence reveals a misunderstanding of the pastoral vocation which also explains, in part, the effects of his second sentence: The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe… Read more →
Pardon me while I opine briefly on religion. This United Church of Christ pastor’s first sentence reveals a misunderstanding of the pastoral vocation which also explains, in part, the effects of his second sentence: The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe… Read more →
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