In the spirit of the season, my recipe for The Very Best Hot Chocolate Ever (or TVBHCE for short. Hah.): I like to start with the biggest mug I can get my hands on, not because it’s required to make a successful cup, but because I’m greedy. We have a few such mugs — a […]
I confess I’m getting a little tired of starting over, beginning again, all that. Then there’s this: Did you know that when you were born, you already had a grip strong enough to support your entire newborn baby weight? Yup. Me, too. So hang on, little tomato, as Pink Martini sings. Hang on.
What if we were to extend our notions of neighborhood to the nonhuman natural world? We’re familiar with the courtesies and manners appropriate for our human neighbors (whether or not we accept them). But what about the heron, the salamander, the fox, the speckled trout? I had a wonderful opportunity to meet and hear Wendell
Neighborly Courtesies in a Wild World Read More »
It was only when I began revising an essay that I discovered what it was about. I had thought the piece would be a simple meditation on what I’d learned about Cyrus the Great over these past few years – the sexy “messiah” byline, author of the first declaration of human rights, all that… and
Revision as Revelation Read More »
It was a great honor to be invited to give the Dillard series of lectures at Trinity United Methodist Church this year. Wow, what a turn-out! and what wonderfully warm, hospitable, and thoughtful folks I met there, people deeply invested in the pursuit of understanding, committed as much to the humbling business of query and
Jazz Riff on Genesis 1 Read More »
What if I took a psalm a day, read it, took a walk, and returned to my desk with jot-able thoughts? There are the year-of-living-some-way books, the applications-of-a-classic books, the travel-across-somewhere or enduring-peculiar-deprivations books,… Why not a scholar’s-nonscholarship-of-a-biblical-book book? Turns out, there are several reasons not, not for me, anyway, not now. The house where
I have been writing in a closet lately. It’s not that I don’t have another, actually quite wonderful place to work. But that other place is a super old building (tough to say – early to mid 1800’s?) that’s not quite water tight, and it’s been a rainy summer. Besides, the view from there is
Writing in a Closet Read More »
These mid-August days, some 2500 years ago, witnessed a violent turn-about in power — regicide followed by a week of king-less days. Imagine for a moment the uncertainty, the chaos. Imagine the mother of the assassinated king. Still alive, for the time being — a foreigner in a court conflicted about its cosmopolitan nature, a
A Woman, the Bible, and Babylon, 560 B.C. Read More »
I have sunk low. From the formal correspondence with perfect spacing that I learned to execute back in grade school – letters hand written, of course, in slow loopy cursive – I have adopted a curt and, I’ll admit it, error-filled email style. If there’s a salutation at all, it often runs like a dog
Grammar wears cut-offs in email Read More »
Sunday morning, and everyone else is at church. Well, not everyone, exactly, and that’s just it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about not-church church. This morning, post beach vacation at the in-laws and suddenly solo for a few days, I feel adrift. The writing projects, both fiction and non-fiction, that have so energized me
Worship in the Sunday Morning Not-Church Read More »
