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 …
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 …
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 …
I had the wonderful opportunity last night to hear Joan Baez live in our little town. Yes, Joan Baez of anti-war, hippie-days, protest, and beautiful love fame. And she was beautiful. The place, Charlottesville’s Pavilion on the downtown mall was packed. Lots of gray heads in the crowd but not all, and everyone seemed to …
What should we do with knowledge that undermines a force for good? I attended the Cyrus Cylinder symposium at DC’s Freer Sackler Gallery, the artifact’s first stop on its U.S. tour. It was a sunny Saturday morning, yet the hall was packed, and no one was snoozing. Rightly so, as the presenters are among the …
Ancient Cyrus Cylinder Stirs Modern Passions and Debate Read More »
The Cyrus Cylinder has great potential for Iran-U.S. relations. So I was thinking: wouldn’t it be great if President Obama were to hike on down to the Freer Sackler Gallery, just a few blocks from the White House to take a look? Here’s my letter inviting him to do so. If you like it, feel …
Where is God that we may give thanks? Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays and not only because it’s specific to our nation. It’s also the one that everybody, no matter what else they believe, can get on board with. We even, for a brief moment, acknowledge the extraordinary people who called this land …
Persian cuisine elevates rice to high art, but it wasn’t always so. When the ten-year-old Cyrus II sat down for his first meal in the palace of his father, Cambyses I, around 568 B.C. he probably didn’t eat rice. As I researched the foods available in ancient Anshan (probably Tel el-Malyan in the modern Iranian …
Marc Chagall was in his 90s when he created a series of stained glass windows, which decades later still draw thousands of visitors each month to the top of a hill in Mainz, Germany. They grace a cathedral, of all things, and that built originally to serve the Holy Roman Empire. It was then vicar …
I feel bad for the psalms, that collection in the Bible called psalmoi, “songs.” Their music, the tunes supposed to accompany them, has been lost to us. Melodies such as “The Lilies,” Doe of the Morning,” and “Do Not Destroy,” affixed to the introduction of individual psalms are mysteries to us. We have no idea …
