personal
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I pray a lot of different prayers. I’ve got a whole lineup of them in the morning and in the evening and at points during the day and week. Some are scheduled, some are accidental. Some are scripted and beautiful, some are sighs and include some not-very-holy words. Some are questions and some are requests.…
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A good friend asked me, “Do you look at your faith differently – decades on – now that you have raised a girl child into a woman?” That seems like an appropriate topic for Father’s Day. It’s a great question, and unfortunately I need a running start to answer it. Lesser loves either prepare us…
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When Jim Valvano coached basketball at NC State, he asked a referee once, “Can you T me up [give me a technical foul] for what I think?” “No, Jimmy,” the ref answered, “I can’t T you up for what you think.” “Well I think you suck,” Valvano retorted. I was thinking about how we get…
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Last week I had planned to write about John Courtney Murray and the concept of religious freedom in American Catholic thought, as a follow up to the piece I did on Romans 13 that exactly three people read. But I wasn’t up to it. I will admit that the news from the Pennsylvania grand jury…
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Take this as a giant maybe, a question to test, a hypothesis. In reflection tonight a few things struck me that, together, seem to encompass a lot of life. The first point was about passions. I was observing how someone close to me is driven by a passion, an inward drive to consume something past…
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I have two habits when I travel for work that people notice. (That I know of.) One is my out of office messages, which do not say “I will be out of the office for business from x to x and will not be checking email. Contact y in an emergency.” That is so, so…
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Today I had the honor and responsibility to lead a very informal service for my family in remembrance of my sister, Sharon. I’m not an ordained…anything, really, but it was a family-only thing at one of her favorite places, Whitey’s Fish Camp, and I was as qualified to lead a service as Whitey’s was to…
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I think the last time I blogged about anything, I banged out some lyrics to songs that had come up in my playlist, but I only referenced one song – Derek Minor’s Change The World (with guest Hollyn). Here’s the song with lyrics for the uninitiated. (I’m not typing it out.) It came up again tonight…
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God weeps too. – Eli, God Weeps Too I was talking with a friend from Tallahassee about Hurricane Irma, which as you know passed through Florida and continues to impact millions of Floridians. He, like me, had been through Leadership Florida, and he relayed a conversation he had had several storms ago with another LF…
Reading Francis 