One evening last week I went out to the patio to start the grill. It had been a dazzling day, hot and blue with a stormy interruption in the late afternoon. Now the evening lay quietly in my backyard, clear and hushed. In the distance, crickets chirruped and cicadas droned. A waning golden light brushed the trees against the fence. Green leaves ripped from their stems along with a few early fall browns mottled the patio table, were stuck in... Read more
Perhaps you will roll your eyes at the rigidity of her moral boundaries. Perhaps you will sneer at her narrow-minded understanding of life and purpose. Yet from all accounts, Alberta was also a deeply spiritual and complex woman—prayerful, faithful, loving, and kind. Read more
How serendipitous for the Democratic party that the economic collapse is happening so happily under its watch. As President Obama’s chief of staff pointed out, we “should never let a crisis go to waste.” In fact, nothing should go to waste. That’s the whole point. The economic disaster has now been inextricably linked (how did this happen?) to the ecological question. The problem is that fixing the economy and fixing the ecology are two different things, and blending the solutions... Read more
I ran across this phrase when it ended up being the answer to a crossword clue about dancing. I wasn’t familiar with it, but sometimes a combination of words strikes me as so serendipitous, so rich in possibilities, that I just savor it for a while, like a hard candy. Read more
Truth, it seems, has fallen on hard times. I Googled “truth” and the first entry was an anti-smoking information website, and “truth” was trademarked. Truth, like so much else in our materialistic world, has become a commercial property. Within the context of a website like Patheos, the issue of truth is even more exigent. Here we offer a palette of religious beliefs, practices, expressions, and histories. A seeker can peruse a wild array of creation accounts, salvation stories, devotional practices,... Read more
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