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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Fancy a Crossword?

There must be a particular type of person who is drawn to crossword puzzles.  First of all, people who spend part of each day on crossword puzzles must love words.  I suspect that if a person doesn’t like words”—the sound of them, their meanings, their spelling—that person would shy away from crossword puzzles.   In school,…