The Divine Hours of Lent

Until recently, there have been relatively few times in my life when I, as an American, have felt any significant need to separate Phyllis the Christian out from Phyllis the Citizen. I have been consciously and outspokenly grateful for that fact many, many times, in fact. But I no longer have such a blessed unity…

Bodies are peculiar things, or at least they seem so to me. They tend to have wills of their own about what they can and can not, will and will not do, almost to the point of being idiosyncratic….or, as my husband Sam would say, almost to the point of being downright peculiar. The “peculiar…

I have been asked several times in the last four weeks about what was the greatest discovery for me in compiling the words of Jesus back into a Sayings gospel format. Obviously, I have been, and am, overjoyed that people care enough and are engaged enough to ask that question and to want an answer…

Today is Leap Year Day, and it positively cries out for some religious commentary or other–some treatise on how it got to be Leap Year in the first place etc., etc. Admittedly, all of that is a pretty good story. It is also an unbelievably intricate and complex one. If you don’t believe me, go…

I will be leaving San Diego this morning. In fact, I am in the airport lounge as you are reading this. I commenced this week in Michigan with the women of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper Michigan. I have spent the last three days here in California with several thousand evangelical clergy at the National…

I am in San Diego at the National Pastors’ Conference. It’s an annual gathering of several thousand pastors who, in this case, are primarily from the western part of our country. As a group, they cut across all kinds of denominational and non-denominational lines. But by and large, regardless of the church structure from which…

I am not a fuss-budget…or I hope I am not, anyway…about kids and how easily we let them make holidays out of holy days. Making parties out of events is part of the magic of childhood, not to mention one of its great virtues. Beside, by definition, holy days are “Feasts” in the rhetoric of…

It happened again last night just at dusk–that first twilight of the frogs’ singing. Sam and I had come in from church and eaten a light lunch, before three friends called to say that they were out for a drive and were coming out to the Farm for a few minutes. Sam, who loves a…

Sam, the son, not the father….Don’t ever name a baby boy after his father without contriving an alternative name by which to call him! It was a problem Sam, the father, had raised for all the months this one was on the way. But Sam, the son, was Number 6 for us, and I was…

Eight weeks ago today, on the last Saturday of 2007 and two days before New Year’s Eve, Devereaux Dunlap Cannon, Jr. got up, went into his kitchen to start the morning coffee, headed back through his dining room toward his study, and never made it all the way across the room. Instead, he fell unconscious…

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