The non-toxic masculinity that has been on display at the Democratic convention in Chicago this week has taken me back more than five decades to my high school years. My high school in northeastern Vermont was a relatively small public school (around 500 students freshman through senior) with a few boarders. We were proud of our sports teams (or at least some of them). Our ski team won the state championship two of the four years I was in high... Read more
I begin the first chapter of my teaching memoir Nice Work If You Can Get It with a scene from my favorite television show. In an early, first-season episode of The West Wing, presidential speech writer Sam Seaborn is attracted to Mallory O’Brien, a fifth-grade teacher who is also the daughter of White House chief of staff Leo McGarry. Sam has managed to offend Mallory unintentionally and wants her to know what he really thinks about teachers: Mallory, education is... Read more
Today is Ordinary Time 13, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Here’s the section for that Sunday in my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy. The appointed Psalm for Ordinary Time 13 Year A is Psalm 139, a meditation on perennial questions that plagued the psalmist three thousand years ago and continues to challenge contemporary humans. Am I good enough? More fundamentally, Do I matter at all? Just about everyone is familiar with “imposter syndrome,” the conviction that although... Read more
Last Sunday Jeanne and I had guests over for dinner whom we had not seen in twenty-five years. Jess and Liz are former students of mine who graduated from Providence College in 1999; after a number of years in California they have recently moved back to southeastern New England. They brought their eight-year-old son Jack along, the first youngster who has been in our house for a while. Liz told me that I looked the same as when she had... Read more
I recently heard an interview on NPR with Rami Nashashibi, a professor of sociology who is also the founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago. Particularly memorable was a brief exchange toward the end of the interview, when Nashashibi told the story of how his four-year-old daughter came to understand the meaning of her name. He explained that his daughter’s name, “Niyyah,” is in both Swahili and Arabic the word for “spiritual intention.” Muslims are... Read more
During my youth and adolescence, my father was the president and primary fundraiser for a small Bible school that he had cofounded around the time I was born. I spent a bridge year there between graduating from high school when I had turned seventeen just two months before graduation and going away to college 2500 miles away from home. In addition to my father, the school had about a half dozen faculty, several of whom were pastors at local churches... Read more
A few days ago Jeanne said “I’ve got something you have to go to.” I’ve learned over 35+ years that her ideas about what I should do are, more often than not, on point–this was one of those times. Not too many spouses would realize that “Theology Beer Camp” would be a perfect fit for their significant other–it’s a little niche–but within 24 hours I had arranged for my son and I to attend (he lives just a few hours... Read more
In one of the possible readings from the Jewish scriptures for this coming Sunday, we find the the prophet Elijah sitting under a broom tree, exhausted and possibly suicidal. It is the middle part of a story from First Kings that contains a great deal of spiritual and psychological wisdom. Here’s how I treat this story in my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy. In the Ordinary Time 2 Year C reading from the Jewish scriptures, we find a... Read more
Organized religion often is a source of packaged answers and comfortable solutions to important questions about God and ourselves. Oneof today’s lectionary reading options from the Jewish scriptures is one of my favorites.. It suggests that eventually such answers and solutions must be left behind. In Exodus, the Israelites (who were miraculously delivered from the pursuing Egyptian armies by the parting of the Red Sea a few chapters earlier), are complaining. And with good reason, because they are hungry in... Read more
He lived over two millennia ago, and as far as we know he never wrote anything. We learn everything we know about him from others, often in reports and descriptions written decades after his death. The reliability and accuracy of these reports are often called into question, since their authors clearly have agendas and interests that undermine objectivity and an accurate accounting of the facts. He had a lot to say and attracted many followers who hung on his every... Read more
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