Uncategorized
-
The journal I’m using has a title page from January 2020, and I chuckle every time I pick it up, because it reminds me of the naïveté of best laid plans. Entering Lent, I wanted to focus on three things. I added a fourth, or rather, a fourth added itself by being so self-evidently necessary. …
-
Good Friday God We want the God of Easter, an all-powerful God who conquers death. We want the God of Emmaus, an all-knowing and wise God who can explain how in the grand plan this wreckage makes righteous sense. But sometimes what we get is the God of Good Friday, an all-loving God who hurts…
-
Fear shrinks our world.Love expands it. But not exactly in a mirroring way. Fear makes us shrink our world by closing off options. We can’t go there/say that/do this/meet them because of a dread of “What if?” When we can’t face down the “What if’s”, they multiply, closing doors of opportunity until we lock ourselves…
-
Castle, caravan, or cookout? Some people see the Church, and the Country, as a castle. A fortress with fortifications constructed to protect the good from the evil. The good people from the evil people. The good values, society, norms, history from the decadent. The Truth from Lies. The Pure from spoil. Usually, it seems, the…
-
His name was Roger. I worked in residence life for three years of undergrad and four years of graduate school, and I will tell you that what I learned helping run dorms has been more useful than anything I learned in classes those seven years. (Except my Radio-TV Speech class; I actually use the skills…
-
I spent more than 17 hours on the phone over a three-week span between Thanksgiving and Christmas with a company’s representatives. (So, how were your holidays?) The first call was 3 ½ hours on hold followed by a 30-minute conversation to make the purchase I intended. Due to a series of errors made by the…
-
“Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words when necessary,” is another quote attributed to Francis of Assisi that he almost certainly didn’t say. Francis used words aplenty to preach the Gospel; in fact, he used all the clubs in the bag, all the tools in the toolbox, all the metaphors in the idiom to…
-
So I cheated. A little. I identified “worship” as a key Franciscan theme, though I think you could make a better case for “prayer”. But I didn’t want a framework with 3 Ps (with poverty and peace), 2 Cs (creation and community) and a random W (witness). So here we are. But using “worship” as…
-
G.O.A.T. stands for Greatest Of All Time. Sports fanatics like to argue about who deserves this honorific in different categories, like greatest player or team or comeback or mascot. Usually, it’s just a way to pass time during commercial breaks or blowouts. For kids, and frankly, for a lot of people, Christmas is clearly the…
