Posts by D C

Mourning the death of someone whom one has loved can take many forms.  Take the recent passing of the songwriter and singer Gordon Lightfoot.  Some of us who love Lightfoot’s many songs and the unique quality of his voice will find it too painful to listen for a while to even one of his creations. …

I will pick on my own ethnic background to offer the following example.  If ninety-five percent of violent crime in this country—murders, gun violence, sexual assaults, trafficking of minors, school bullying, hate crimes, and road rage—were committed by Swedish-Americans, wouldn’t we demand to know what’s terribly wrong with Americans of Swedish ancestry?  Wouldn’t we investigate…

There is a scene in Archibald MacLeish’s play “J.B.” that wouldn’t be so sad if it weren’t repeated so often.     “J.B” is MacLeish’s modern retelling of the Biblical book of Job, and, In this scene, J.B’s family is enjoying Thanksgiving dinner.  Joy is the emphasized word.  J.B’s children are really into the festive spirit, laughingly…

A favorite game of history lovers is the “what if” game.  A version of the “what if” game is currently being played on a popular TV program, a show that imagines what America would be like if Germany and Japan had won WW II.  Another popular program imagines life in our country if Russia had…

Many Christmases ago, a relative of mine received what was then a new toy.  The toy was an oval track with a battery-powered booster on one side that propelled a Hot Wheels car around the track.  The car would be shot out of the booster at high speed, then slowly decelerate as it made its…

I suspect that everyone who loves sacred scriptures, no matter what scriptures that person considers sacred, has experienced something similar to what I experienced thirty years ago.  After decades of reading and studying the Bible, my tradition’s sacred text, I came across a passage that I never noticed before.  When that happened, I was stopped…

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…