Advent always feels a little like the end of the semester, when the deadline for the final term paper is looming and the final exam is ahead and you’ve schluffed off on the required reading and the homework, and you start hyperventilating about what it’s going to mean to your GPA. No matter how many […]

Getting to church early on All Souls’ Day is a tradition of mine. I hope for a few moments in solitude and quiet to focus on the book. Not the liturgy of the day, but the Book of Dead, the ledger that will be out near the altar all month, a congregational prayer list open […]

“To everything there is a season.” Familiar words, a passage from the Old Testament that you’ll hear in a homily, often in a eulogy, sometimes in politicians’ rhetoric. There it was in the daily newspaper Sept. 23, on that page dedicated to deep, thoughtful, insightful perspectives on our lives and times. No, it wasn’t the […]

Conquering addiction requires friends, family, saints We celebrated a milestone in the life of a beloved elder a couple weeks ago by following his longstanding wishes. There was no party, no gifts, no spreading the word so more people would chime in. It’s an anniversary he never announces in advance and I don’t believe he […]

Expect another “ta-DAH” announcement any day from city hall about yet another solution to the homeless problem. Oops, do I mean homeless issue? Has problem become politically incorrect? I don’t expect another of those city government lightning strikes to replace tents with flower planters, or haul the last pitiful possessions of people away as trash; […]

How did they tell the story later, Peter, James and John, I wonder, Good Jewish men, they’d been raised on the story from centuries earlier about Moses going to a mountaintop and hearing Yahweh himself establishing his covenant with Israel. There the three humble fishermen were, on another mountaintop when they witnessed Jesus, joined by […]