News & Articles
Chances Are
I’m offering a challenge this week. The first part of the challenge is to recall three or four people who have come into your life in the past ten years and whose friendship has made a positive difference. How many of those new friendships began with a chance encounter? The second part of the challenge…
Questions That Deserve Answers
I have some questions for Donald Trump. Reliable sources report that Trump has admitted three times recently that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 “by a whisker.” My main question, then, is what was the point of the January 6th attack on the Capitol? Having admitted that you knew you were lying, what do…
Words That Still Live
A few weeks ago, a friend at church reminded me that the service isn’t over with the benediction. We were sitting downstairs at the coffee hour when he told me that the scripture from that morning had been one that changed his life years before. He then shared what the passage had meant at a…
A Magical Night
I recently read an article that said that the best fishing stories emphasize “we,” not “I.” I take that comment to mean that the best fishing stories involve several people, even if only one person is holding the pole. My favorite fishing memory unfolded on a July evening in 1986, the only night that I…
Still More To Learn
In 2007, I had a life-changing experience when I traveled across the country to interview monks, nuns, and retreat leaders. I wanted to hear their wisdom about what we as a country might have learned from 9/11. They did not disappoint me. It was my students who prompted me to take this journey and conduct…
Not Going Back
The metaphor that came to mind last month was that the music has changed. The last nine to ten years have been dominated by a tone of fear, belittling, obsession with conspiracies, and anger. That tone began a decade ago when Trump propagated the belief that Obama wasn’t born in the US and was thereby…