Ah the divine swine! While in Greensboro to do lectures at my former doctoral student’s college, Greensboro College (a UMC school, on which see the poster below), we managed to squeeze in some local ‘cue, as it’s called locally. We went to two famous barbecue joints— one in Greensboro, and one in Durham. They are Bullocks (Durham) and Stamey’s (Greensboro) and they both serve eastern N.C. style barbecue, which means hickory smoked chopped pork, with vinegar sauce and pepper (and... Read more

West Market St. UMC, like many churches built near the end of the 19th century has an interesting, rather Victorian structure, as you will now see. The outside has both a bell tower, and and a rounded portion to the right of the front entrance. Here’s some shots of the central portion of the sanctuary. What makes this sanctuary distinctive is that it has an antechamber to the left of the sanctuary that can either be included in, or excluded... Read more

In the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some of my church adventures from the events I did this Fall. I’ll start with West Market St. UMC in Greensboro N.C. where my Mom first joined the Methodist Church. This church has remarkable stained glass windows, which were bought at the Columbus exhibition in Chicago by a representative of the church near the turn of the 20th century. The church itself was built in 1890. This first window is of the... Read more

My girls loved this whiny song and singer. I think this parody is better 🙂 Read more

Certainly one of the most remarkable phenomena in all of entertainment is the continued worldwide popularity of the James Bond films, despite running through numerous actors, plots, scenarios, degrees of fidelity to the original Ian Fleming novels (which I read as a teenager). And most recently of course, we now have a man, Daniel Craig, who not only looks the part more than almost all of his predecessors (some still prefer Sean Connery), but also has brought a raw, fresh,... Read more

My Mom, who lives in her home town of Wilmington N.C. often sends me newspaper clippings, and sometimes the material is blog worthy, this being such a time. Here is a picture of a man who was baptized in the Fifth Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington in November of 1880. The man’s name was Charles Jones Soong. This story was told because two weeks ago in that same church his great grandson, Michael Feng, a NY city financial adviser,... Read more

I’ve been saving the best part for last, namely the $46 million dollar score board, which is of course larger than any other one on the planet. By comparison, the old Texas stadium where the Cowboys used to play only cost a mere $45 million to build. Here are two shots to give you some sense of the size of the scoreboard. Let’s just hope that little thing never falls on the field when anyone is below. Among the many... Read more

There never would have been a stadium like AT+T in all likelihood, had there not been a very successful Cowboys franchise for Jerry Jones to buy. He does not own the stadium, or better said, he is a minority owner of it along with the town of Arlington Texas where it is located. If you are not overcome by the triptofan effect of turkey yet, you may remember that Tom Landry, an excellent coach, and also a devout Christian, is... Read more

It’s only appropriate at Turkey Day time that we speak of that other religion in America that is celebrated on that day— I’m referring to football of course, and the epicenter of football mania is of course Texas. Shoot, even High School ball is on TV down there with regularity. And of course it is also true that ‘everything is bigger in Texas’. Take for example the stadium you see depicted above (N.B. all these pictures are taken by your... Read more

[The following are the verbatim conclusions from John’s book,reprinted here by kind permission of Eerdmans] Chapter 18: Conclusions This book has offered a new approach to the concept of “grace,” a new analysis of Second Temple theologies of divine beneficence, and a new reading of Galatians and Romans through the lens of Paul’s theology of grace. We may summarize its distinctive contribution under five heads. 1. Grace as Gift: Since both Paul and his contemporaries used the normal vocabulary of... Read more