News & Articles
Say What?
I suspect that everyone who loves sacred scriptures, no matter what scriptures that person considers sacred, has experienced something similar to what I experienced thirty years ago. After decades of reading and studying the Bible, my tradition’s sacred text, I came across a passage that I never noticed before. When that happened, I was stopped…
Learning to Appreciate Our Differences
Teaching religious studies for four decades was a great joy and a great responsibility. One of my responsibilities was to help students negotiate a religiously diverse world and an increasingly religiously diverse America. I predicted that my students would likely have colleagues in their future careers from a variety of religious traditions. Some workplaces treat…
Worship in Black and White
When friends discover that my father was a minister, they seem to assume that I had a sheltered childhood. In some senses, they are right. In some ways, I saw less of life than my friends, but in other ways, I saw more. In significant ways, my childhood gave me a different vantage point on…
The Power of Passion
As is true of many who have been blessed to be teachers, I had one overriding hope for my time with students. I hoped that they would see that teaching was not just my job, but my passion, something I loved. At some time during a semester, I would pause and comment on the…
Field of Dreams
While riding on a train goin’ westI fell asleep for to take my restI dreamed a dream that made me sadConcerning myself and the first few friends I had Bob Dylan’s Dream Sometimes life does imitate art, and almost everyone can relate to Dylan’s nostalgic ballad Bob Dylan’s Dream. Despite being quite young when he…
Seeing the Bigger Picture
I admit it. I’m a political junkie. Before politics, my passion was history. The connection between history and politics makes sense especially if a person defines politics as history unfolding. Currently, history is unfolding in ways that make many people nervous. I understand that, and I share that anxiety. But I refuse to give in…