I spend part of Friday morning in the dementia unit at a local assisted living center. (Some mornings getting the kids off to school—barely— I wonder if I belong there.) This past Friday Tom was there as usual, motionless and catatonic, staring somewhere into space. It is rare that he responds to questions now. If…

I’m slowly making my way through Dante’s Inferno after our time in Tuscany. Right now that means dawdling in the seventh circle of hell with avaricious money lenders—look out, Wall Street—and, not surprisingly, Dante’s hell is hot and very unpleasant. So hell was therefore already on my mind when I caught someone reading a contemporary…

The older I get the more I’m convinced a whole lot of life is about letting go. The only problem is I’m not very good at it. Maybe you can identify. Here’s a short list that helps me let go in times when I’m grieving something I’ve lost or am feeling stuck in an unhealthy…

Meanwhile, when the crowd gathered by the thousands, so that they trampled on one another, [Jesus] began to speak first to his disciples, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, that is, their hypocrisy. 2 Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. 3 Therefore whatever you have…

Author of The Ragamuffin Gospel Brennan Manning passed away early Saturday morning. Like most of us, he lived a life of mistakes, U-turns, detours, tumbles and face plants. What made his life shine with meaning and purpose were his radical embrace of God’s grace and his undying commitment to share this gift with others. Manning…

It’s a beautiful spring day in Atlanta, Georgia and this song (see below Youtube clip) by Telepopmusik kept me moving on today’s morning jog. Other things that happened this week: – Fellow saint and sinner Paul (a.k.a. known as “hubby” to this saint and sinner) queried, in response to the post, The Dating Game Jesus,…

  Lately, God has been talking to me about what it means to hear God speak. First, there was Stanford anthropologist TM Luhrmann’s article, which begged my initial question in Friday’s post: what does it mean to hear God speak? Then there was Sunday’s sermon by Thomas Daniel- all about how learning to hear God’s voice is,…

How do you describe a smell? Surely, Hemingway or Faulkner or another of the real literary greats could help here. For the time being, imagine oregano on steroids. That’s what happened when I emerged from Whole Foods the other day with “nature’s strongest known antibiotic.” The directions on the bottle call for “1-4 drops daily…

Every year the president of a large, nationwide trucking company makes a visit to every affiliate in cities across America. It’s always a couple weeks before Christmas. One of the men who works in the warehouse told me.  He’s always smiling, but this day he exclaimed, “You need to meet our president! What I love…

“A suspension of disbelief is…what links literature and religion, both of which require a leap of faith as the first step.” So goes yesterday’s post from Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish.”  Its focus is the writer Madeleine L’Engle, author of the work A Wrinkle in Time and other fantastical children’s books, upon the recent release of a…

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