Good work

It’s really important, I think, to be fulfilled in one’s work.

Anniversaries

This year is the 100th anniversary of the composition of Holst’s First Suite in Eb for Military Band.
This year is the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death.
This year is the 200th anniversary of the composition of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address, a seminal American Restoration Movement document.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of [...]

Now hold on there!

It does a soul good to have this question asked of it periodically:  What am I holding on to?
In my years of congregational life as an adult, I have often observed a strong tendency to hold on to things that do not merit such tenacity.  I have been guilty, too.
There is One worthy of our clinging, though . [...]

Alex’s gaze

Years ago, my boss told me something I just had to share with you.  It was about her daughter — 8 years old at the time, and as alive to the world as they come.
We worked in Center City Philadelphia where the skyline is pretty impressive (if not quite New York City’s).  One day Lee [...]

A short distance

There remain two imperatives for Christians who desire but to follow Jesus’ steps into God’s kingdom.

Pacif* (iers, ism)

Soon, I need to go downstairs to check to see if Jedd’s pacifier is making him uncomfortable by pressing into his face. When pacifiers are not used the way they’re intended, they don’t pacify as much.
And when the term “pacifism” is used carelessly, it can make us uncomfortable, too.
I speak not as a war-protesting [...]

Forgiveness

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness, or so said William Blake, as quoted in Darryl Tippens, Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life.
A week ago, in one of my classes, a containable verbal skirmish broke out in connection with my mention of the September 25 Muslim prayer gathering on [...]

We’ve never ____ before. . . .

If you noticed the slug on this post, you might have thought it would be about change in the church. I once considered myself a “change agent,” despite the dirty-word status of that term in some circles. These days, I’m much more content to be viewed as a person interested in a) content [...]

Consistent voices

Christendom has its share of struggles and scourges. There’s truly a lot to criticize (although not as much as the news media appears to believe).
But I find in contemporary Christian culture that there have been some consistent voices … voices that have spoken for more than a decade and have not succumbed to scandal. [...]

Morning

I’ve always seemed to be, more or less, a morning person. That doesn’t mean that I bounce or spill out gleeful ecstasies or annoy others, necessarily; it just means that after a night’s sleep, I have the most mental energy in the mornings and am generally pleasant then, I think.
Karly doesn’t think she’s a [...]