Passion Quilt: Gotta Love the Books! Chas Clifton, author of Letter from Hardscrabble Creek, has tagged me with a teaching meme, focused on what is our passion as teachers. And partly because, when I sit in worship and ask what it is I am supposed to be doing, I often see the face of one or another particular students, and partly because I think that there are so many things out there that can leach away a teacher’s joy in... Read more

Having read the news at The Wild Hunt of Amazon’s heavy-handed bullying of small-house publishers, I had to do something. I know many of my readers will already have made the decision not to buy from Amazon, based on our support for small bookstores. I guess I’ve always figured that my book-buying budget was big enough to support an entire industry anyhow! But this latest move is too much for my conscience. I’m going cold turkey on Amazon, at least... Read more

I’m sad now. I’m sad, but it’s more complex than that. I’m still at my school, and I just ran into a favorite student from years past, one who enlisted early in the National Guard. She’s just completed basic training, and she came back to say hello, wearing her uniform. I saw her, and my heart did a funny little hiccup thing, and I gave her a big hug. Had I realized before how small she is, how delicate? Standing... Read more

So, this is yet another in a series of recent “shameless plug” blog posts. Yet once again, I can’t apologize. I’ve just read the most recent entry in my daughter’s blog, Brain Clutter, and I’m impressed (and proud). I mean, she’s smart, she’s artistic, she’s gifted and takes the art of photography seriously. All of those are reasons to feel that happy mama feeling. But it’s the quality of moral discernment in her writing, added to all the rest, that... Read more

This one has been making the rounds in both the Quaker and the Pagan world… Normally, I would place a meme on The Back Page–that being why I created it. But since Cosette of Pandora’s Bazaar not only tagged me, but named Quaker Pagan Reflections itself in her own Book Meme post, that would probably be cheating. And, in any case, the book that is immediately to hand is one I’ve got a few thoughts about worth the sharing. So,... Read more

I dreamed yesterday morning of the land where I grew up. The land where I grew up was not a family farm. We’re all allowed to romanticize a family farm. We see something admirable in families trying to maintain ties to the old homestead, when it’s a farm that’s been in the family for generations. But my home was not on an old home place, just a two acre plot of woodlot, lawn, and garden with a somewhat boxy two... Read more

So here I am, back reading more of Marcus Borg‘s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally. I’m making a slow job of it–in part because Peter has had the book for a while. Partly, though, I just find Borg… thin. I may have to stop every two or three pages when I’m reading a meaty Quaker writer like Lloyd Lee Wilson, just to reboot my head after I hit my personal... Read more