Posts by D C

The winter holidays including New Year celebrations are days steeped in traditions, traditions that hold together memories of the past and hopes for the future. It isn’t really Christmas for my wife until she makes the traditional Swedish Christmas cookies that her grandmothers and their grandmothers made. Part of my wife’s joy is anticipating the…

Whether you pray often or not at all, your first response to the question, “Does Everyone Pray?” might be “no.” If we think of prayer as thinking or saying certain words to a Divine Being, I would agree that not everyone offers that kind of prayer. But there are two dimensions to prayer, with our…

Americans like their religious leaders to be non-controversial and non-confrontational. When they upset us, we feel a foul has been committed, a kind of “roughing the believer” infraction. This is especially true in sacred holiday seasons, when we’d rather see children dressed as shepherds and singing about peace on earth than hear our religious leaders…

As a professor of religious studies, I had several options about how I would present the religious diversity of our world. I could take the stance that I was raised in, which stated that only my religion held the truth and people of other religions needed to change. If I took this approach, I would…

I’ve recently been thinking about truth. This focus on truth has happened seemingly by chance, but one of the things I’ve learned over my seventy-odd years is to note when life seems to be saying “Pay attention.” It was a clue to a crossword puzzle that started my recent pondering of truth. Until I was…

Our country has been through another election cycle, and once again campaigning has widened the gulf separating us. We’ve endured months of vitriol from both sides, which leaves us asking, “Where do we go from here?” I believe one answer to that question lies outside of politics. Each side has said everything it can to…

One of the shared convictions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that most of the men and women venerated as true prophets suffered, and in some cases were even martyred for their messages. That belief helps us answer the question “What is a prophet, anyway?” If a prophet were someone God called to foretell the…

Last week, while visiting our older son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, I noticed a cloth banner in their kitchen that commemorated women gaining the right to vote in 1920. On the Sunday of our visit, a woman in my son’s and daughter-in-law’s church was honored on her 100th birthday. She was on a walker, but was…

It is tempting to assume that all prayer is beneficial. The reformer Martin Luther knew better, once making the perceptive comment that a person praying should be careful, as praying can lead to a multitude of sins. In this, Luther was simply agreeing with Jesus, who offered a parable about a religious person who used…

Not that long ago, one network had the slogan “Must See TV.” I would frequently laugh when I heard the phrase. I estimate that a good ninety-five percent of what I’ve watched on TV changed nothing in my life—not how I understood my world, my society, myself, or how we should live. As a friend…