In my religious tradition, we didn’t do saints. But we did do Christmas pageants—big time. I remember in various pageants being an angel, a wise man, a shepherd—all of the usual male roles. My most triumphant pageant appearance, though, was the year I got to be Joseph. Wearing a white dish towel on my head secured with a bathrobe belt, I gazed with a holy aspect at the plastic headed Jesus in the make-shift manger while the narrator read the... Read more
As I begin to prepare for my next book project, a memoir on the teaching and academic life tentatively titled Nice Work if You Can Get It: Lessons and Stories from a LIfe in the Classroom, I’m returning to posts from the recent four years that I was the director of a large program on campus. I learned a lot about myself and others during those years, including some useful quick ways to categorize people that helped me sort out how... Read more
A few years ago, a Facebook friend posted a poll on her site. The question was: Which is more meaningful to you—Christmas or Easter? While many respondents commented that their vote was based on which of the two seasons they found more entertaining or less stressful, the most interesting comments were from those who made their choice on what these two holidays mean to them as persons of Christian faith. The underlying faith question is: Which is more central to... Read more
In a second season episode of “The Chosen,” a multi-year cinematic treatment of the life of Jesus that just began its third season, Jesus has a private conversation with his relative John the Baptist (known to Jesus’ disciples as “Creepy John”). They clearly have known each other since they were boys; they not only are friends, but also have a strong sense of each other’s calling. John, appropriately scraggly as one would expect a guy who eats locusts and wild... Read more
Herodotus is considered to be the first true historian in the contemporary sense of the word; historian or not, he’s a great story-teller. He records page after page of anecdotal tales about strange and distant lands, stories often based more on second-hand rumor than direct observation. Consider, for instance, his description of a certain Thracian tribe’s practices at the birth of a baby: When a baby is born the family sits round and mourns at the thought of the sufferings... Read more
On the last Wednesday of September, an event took place on my college campus that was several months in the making. Called “With Mutual Respect: Discussions on Contemporary Challenges,” it was the first in a projected series of dialogue/discussion event on controverial topics initiated by the President of the college last May. In the interest of starting with the most controversial topic imaginable, the issue under discussion was abortion. On a Catholic campus. Imagine that. I wrote early in September... Read more
In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” as its word of the year, an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” I can’t imagine what happened in 2016 that would have cause them to make that choice. Those of us who pine for the good old Comedy Central days of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” followed by “The Colbert Report”... Read more
Advent began last Sunday. For many reasons, Advent is my favorite season of the liturgical year and I have often written over the past decade about the various ways in which Advent fits both my understanding of my Christian faith and my personality perfectly. This year, Advent promises to be somewhat different, since for reasons both professional and personal I am currently on an open-ended hiatus/sabbatical/time out from regular church attendance. I’ve given a sermon during Advent each of the... Read more
In the interdisiplinary and team-taught honors course I am teaching in this academic year, we are closing the semester with considerations of important events, movements, and texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The topic for seminar yesterday was Christian responses to social upheaval, particularly the social gospel. Among other texts, the students read Pope Leo XIII’s influential 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and the introduction to Walter Rauschenbusch’s 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch was... Read more
Happy New Year! Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the first day of the new liturgical year. That’s Year One in the Book of Common Prayer daily readings, and Year A for the Sunday and Feast Day Lectionary, if you are keeping score at home. Although I have now spent well over half of my life as an Episcopalian, as a born and raised Baptist I still find all of this liturgical and lectionary stuff just as fascinating and... Read more
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