News & Articles
Homecomings
Coming home. Homecoming. This is a tradition centuries old and even older for species such as birds who migrate thousands of miles to return to nesting sites. I was thinking about the attraction of human homecomings last weekend when I attended Franklin College’s annual fall celebration by the same name–Homecoming. A past student of mine…
The Beauty of a Slow Read
There are some books that can be read quickly. There are other books that should come with a note stamped on the cover: “Best read slowly.” One of the books that deserve a slow read is When the Music Stopped: Willy Rosen’s Holocaust, a work by a friend and colleague, Dr. Casey Hayes. Is the…
Seeing the Whole Picture
History has always fascinated me. Some of my school friends hated memorizing dates, battles, and presidents, but I loved all of that. But I also found history to sometimes be confusing. From my Sunday school experience, I knew that the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt was the most important…
What is a Saint?
One of my favorite spiritual writers, Thomas Merton, offered an important insight about saints. He wisely observed that saints are not perfectionists. That is, we shouldn’t expect a saint to be someone who has lived a perfect life or has even aspired to live such a life. Saints are human beings; people who have struggled,…
Honoring a Great Baseball Player and City
St. Louis is a special baseball city. I remember the sportscaster Bob Costas saying that Cardinal fans were the most knowledgeable baseball fans in America. Tony La Russa, manager of the Cardinals for sixteen seasons, once remarked that people in St. Louis would stop him on the street to suggest different batting lineups. Although I…
The Lesson of Northern Ireland
When I was a graduate student in the early seventies in Scotland, my wife and I wanted to visit Ireland. The distance between Glasgow, Scotland, and Dublin, Ireland is roughly the same mileage as between Johnson County and Chicago, so it wasn’t the length of the trip that prevented our visit. And even though we…