PATHEOS – December 2012   November 2012 was about as singular as any month could ever contrive to be. Most certainly it was as portentous as any should ever wish to be. In this country, it saw the election of our first Buddhist senator, our first Hindu congressperson, as well as of our first nontheist [...]

  “Let us now praise famous men,” is itself about as famous as any self-respecting phrase could ever hope to be. Certainly, it is more bandied about than is any other of those we have lifted whole-cloth out of the Apocrypha. But every once in a while…in a great, great while, in fact…I still want [...]

Earlier this year, Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and, thereby, formerly the tutelary head of the Anglican communion world-wide, shocked me. Then, I was further shocked by the discovery that I should have not been shocked in the first place…that I was, in fact, one of a fairly limited number of folk who [...]

Wade Tickle is almost eleven years old, and he is terrified of wasps. When he was younger, he was only afraid of them. Now he is paralyzed by the mere possibility of them. Normally, this would not be a problem….a quirk maybe, a source of some parental concern and, unfortunately, of some unkind teasing, but [...]

PATHEOS – August 2012 July 4th …any and every July 4th…is firmly engrained in our American consciousness as being forever and always our nation’s major civil holiday. Over the years, we have made such a vociferous celebration of the whole thing, in fact, that much of the non-North American world is almost as aware as we [...]

One of the few things in this life that I really do try to be careful about is the business of proper citation. When I find an idea worth taking, I am grateful enough not to morph into a ready thief certainly. And usually…at least so far as I know…I also am pretty good at [...]

Some several weeks ago now, I spent a laughter-filled few days in Tellico Community, in my native East Tennessee hills. While going home again has never been big on my list of to-do things, those few days have given me pause to re-consider. Anyway, be all that as it may, my two or three days in Tellico [...]

Every single year, one of the great mysteries of Easter for me has to do with Eastertide, and not so much with Easter per se. And every year, as I make my way through the daily propers and the Sabbath texts, I feel the same need to say, “But…..” I never say it, of course, [...]

7 April 2012 Holy Saturday… …what a strange name for a day. Yet it has always seemed to me to be eerily appropriate in the same way that the striking of the hall clock just at midnight every night seems to me to be strangely holy. There is that quiet, as if the whole house [...]

PATHEOS – March 2012 Just a few days before Lent began this year and in anticipation of it, Doug Pagitt–who somehow always manages to pastor us all, thank God– set a date for the two of us to engage in a Skyped conversation about Lent. But not about Lent in general, he said. Rather, he [...]