Driving in Maine a couple weeks ago, I saw a small building, looked like it used to be an ice cream stand, sitting in the middle of a parking lot, with a huge sign on the roof, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE SHOP. The sides were plastered with more signs, reassuring customers that We Help You Find the Best Plan, and No One Too Poor to Be Insured, and the like. There’s a lot of poverty in Maine. I had a memory... Read more

Jesus told a story about a fellow who made himself rich twice. He was the bookkeeper for a rich man, a landowner. and the first fortune came from cheating the landowners’ tenants by adding false charges to their bills. He made the landowner really wealthy by doing this, and made himself an indispensable employee. But then the economy changed. The landowner was losing money fast. And the bookkeeper was really scared about his own future. So he switched his loyalty.... Read more

The drought in New England is now extreme. Town bans on outside watering have been in place for some weeks. I lug a pail of water out to the remaining bloomers every few days, praying for rain so that parched trees, their leaves folded in, may have relief. The water department has been going around shutting off outside water taps. It seemed a harsh enforcement, until the news came of people whose wells had gone dry. And that Worcester MA... Read more

Loser is damnation incarnate. It’s the worst thing you can possible be. A nobody. And cursed. Without a chance of a different future, because the label itself is a curse. Lost, though, has hope embedded in its peril, for Found is an inherent possibility in the midst of your peril. Lost has a prayer and a chance, and bending your spirit in fervent devotion to that chance can be a step on the salvation road. Loser has been at the... Read more

The seeds of dislike of immigrants have been sown in America since the days of Plimoth Colony, when their intense dislike of the Wollaston colony culminated in the sending of a letter of complaint about the behavior of the Wollastonites, to the Royal Governor. Wollaston, located in what is now Quincy MA and memorialized by Wollaston Beach, was a colony created by a British army Colonel named Wollaston, whose dreams of a plantation, worked by several hundred indentured servants, came... Read more

Harsh words from Jesus: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”  The sharp edge here cuts right to the bone. Well, there is a harshness to family relations, and bitter feelings that get poured out to therapists and salved by friends, or else they produce rifts and divorces. We know this. Jesus knows it too, and argued with his own mother... Read more

Winning without humility – that’s what the American motto for the Olympics should be – said Malcom Gladwell, English born Canadian journalist and writer, and staff writer for the New Yorker since the 1990s. Gladwell said this in an interview on NPR as the Olympics began. Before gold medalist Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers drunkenly vandalized a Rio gas station bathroom and complained he was a victim in the incident. Gladwell wasn’t talking about gross public behavior by American... Read more

I never heard of Sam Polk till recently. And I’d forgotten Ryan Lochte after the 2012 London Olympics, remembering him only when the Rio games began. Sam Polk is not an athlete, and he’s not in Rio. In fact, he’s a fellow who gave up chasing gold and trying to win at the tender age of thirty. Polk was a Wall Street wunderkind, he’d made millions then. In an interview with Paul Solman on PBS News Hour, Polk talked about... Read more

You can Google bent over women, and see some images that give you shivers. Women living now, in very poor countries, whose heads cannot rise above their knees. There is no work for them, and no one wants them, or even wants to be seen with them. So unlucky. They are untouchable women, who beg for a living. It happens that, in my congregation, there is a bent-over man. He suffers from ankylosing spondelitis. And it has cost him his... Read more

No, I haven’t read Trump’s book. The deal in play right now, though, is winning the November election. And the art of this deal, as played out between the two major party contenders, is the style of their deal-making. Each considers the other’s style a disgrace, and their own a virtue. The art of the deal, this momentous election deal, is a contest between a tycoon and a negotiator. The tycoon is autocratic, combining influence, persuasion, lures and threats into a... Read more