This year Jeanne and I spent this year at home for Christmas for the first time in some time–we actually travelled despite Covid warning each of the last twoo Christmases. Amongst other things, we watched two versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the classic 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and George C. Scott starring in the 1982 rendition, my favorite of the many available. For each of last four academic years, I have had the privilege of team-teaching... Read more
Good people all, this Christmas time Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending his beloved son On this Christmas Day, I wish you the happiest of holidays. Here is a beautiful rendition of one of my favorite Christmas carols, the Irish “Wexford Carol.” Alison Krause, Yo-Yo Ma, a violin, bagpipes, percussion . . . it doesn’t get any better! Read more
A few years ago, I was asked to take on a temporary administrative position for the following semester in addition to my teaching duties. After agreeing to do so, my first step was to go on a fact-finding and listening tour, talking individually with the dozen or so people most knowledgeable concerning the issues I knew I would be grappling with. As I spent an hour or more with each of these colleagues, I found that it was often difficult... Read more
This has been an unusual Advent season. Advent is my favorite season in the liturgical calendar; it has been a decade-long tradition that I give the sermon on one of the four Advent Sundays at the Episcopal church I am involved with. For various reasons, though, I am on an open-ended sabbatical/hiatus from church—which has given me the opportunity, when I have chosen to take it, to think and feel carefully about a number of things that I have often... Read more
If you have been a regular reader of this blog for a while (there are a few of you out there), you may have noticed that most of what I have posted in the last three or four months is familiar. “I’ve read something like this before,” you might be saying. And you would be right. For a number of different reasons, the majority of essays I have posted over the past several weeks are do-overs, golden oldies with appropriate... Read more
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
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