Posts by D C

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

I grew up in a time when most people in my town were members of one local church or another.  I recall this with no intention of romanticizing an era when participation in religious life was so assumed that asking for one’s religious affiliation could be found on job applications.  In that environment, I remember…

I begin by apologizing to all the military balloon experts who will be insulted by my flippant attitude, but I have to admit that my first reaction to the Chinese balloon that floated over the country was to smile and say, “Really?  You sent a balloon to spy on us?”  I thought immediately of a…

“You’re really going to put the fox in charge of the henhouse?”  That’s the question that struck me when I read recently that the United Nations appointed Sultan al-Jabar, a Mideast oil executive, to lead the climate talks this fall in the United Arabs Emirates.   Rightly, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance expressed its outrage…

My parents moved to another city when I was away at college.  On my first visit to our new home, I discovered that my Dad had thrown out my collection of baseball cards in the move.  Ever since then, I have wondered if there were some rare and valuable cards that ended up in the…