Posts by D C

Of all the sports I played when I was young, baseball was my favorite.  I loved playing the game, loved watching my favorite team on black-and-white TV, loved shuffling through my baseball cards, and loved oiling my Andy Pafko mitt.  Whenever the weather was warm enough, my brother and I would play catch until dark.  …

There are fewer and fewer gatherings where people of different political persuasions can be together harmoniously.  The current political climate has separated colleagues, families, and friends.  In addition, each election cycle, with character assassination replacing civil discourse, only intensifies the gulf between us.  Of course, unless we are hermits, we can’t avoid being in groups. …

In a recent conversation, my younger son shared an experience he had with someone he’d met through work.  In his capacity as a scriptwriter and videographer for an online company, he was invited to dinner by a corporate lawyer.  When she asked him what he intended to order, he mentioned something mid-priced on the menu. …

It has been a sobering summer weatherwise.  Fires in Canada and Washington State  have produced smoke that’s covered much of the country.   Some fires are still not extinguished.   Tornadoes are also coming at an alarming rate and hitting states outside what had been called “tornado alley.” While some areas of the earth are ravaged by…

Listening to a monk on a podcast recently speak of his time in the monastery, I heard him remark, “The reason I came here isn’t the reason I stayed.”  That phrase stuck in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw that it applies to more than monks and monasteries. …

I recently read the obituary of Clara Ester in the New York Times.  I know I’m not the only person who’s been ignorant of the role Clara Ester played in one of the world’s saddest moments.  Clara Ester was a twenty-year-old college student in Memphis in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to that…

There are not many topics that I could count on to interest every student I taught.  However, the human hunger for meaning is one of them.   No matter how old my students were, whether fresh out of high school or in their seventies and eighties, I knew that discussing meaning, and our endless quest to…

With the recent revelations about UFOs and extraterrestrials, I’ve noticed an increased interest in angels.  Some people are suggesting that the non-human visitors to our planet are, in fact, angels, although there is a disagreement about whether the angels are benevolent or evil.  In my graduate studies of ancient religions, I learned that the Jewish…

I’m sure my ancestors would have been surprised at how much my wife and I were rooting for Norway in the World Cup.   To understand their surprise, you need to know a bit about the relations between Norway and Sweden, home of my wife’s and my ancestors. I grew up hearing the story of my…

A promise I make to myself every summer is to read something from one of my favorite writers, Sigurd Olson.  Olson was a prominent conservationist who helped preserve some of the last remaining wild places in North America.  The other night, I read “Jumping Off Places,” an essay from his book Runes of the North. …