I wonder what my father might say, confronted with this evidence of the best in human nature. My parents were secretive in many things. Well before they died, my mother assured me, their only child, my name was on all their various financial accounts, checking, savings, CD’s, IRA, all that. This was their major rationale for never creating a trust, as I wanted them to do, or leaving a will. They could not understand a trust and a will would... Read more
“If Immigration says I’m an ‘alien,’ I get to pick the planet.” I thought that over. “Good enough, and welcome to Earth.” Immigrants, I’ve discovered, like telling their stories and I’m pretty forward in asking. I hear an accent I want to know where it comes from. I met an Indian Sikh woman who honors Christmas every year with a tree, a real tree, not a fake. She is clear about that, adamant, not artificial. It is part of what... Read more
The Missouri River stretches across Missouri more or less parallel to Interstate 70. Highway and river intersect in many places as both amble across the state through a band of thirteen or seventeen connected counties (depending on how tourist guides count them), once called Little Dixie. Little Dixie really begins in the west at Kansas City, where the Kansas River meets the Missouri. From there, it turns east toward St. Louis where the Missouri meets the Mississippi. Early settlers, attracted by... Read more
I do not understand the family’s reaction, not from the sermon I read. Even less do I understand the archdiocese’s swift slap at the pastor. Fr. Don LaCuesta, pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Temperance, Michigan, was summarily suspended from preaching funeral homilies “for the foreseeable future” December 14 by the Archdiocese of Detroit. LaCuesta preached a homily for a victim of suicide, an 18-year-old man that, to say the least, was poorly received. The archdiocesan... Read more
Liberals and Conservatives employ a “religious test” when it suits their purposes, inflaming their base supporters by half-truths and constitutional incomprehension. LifeNews, which bills itself as “The Pro-Life News Source,” in a piece by Micaiah Bilger took a swing at the newly sworn-in senator from Arizona, Krysten Sinema. She wasn’t holding a Bible, but a law book, for her ceremonial hand-on-book photograph with the president of the Senate. Earlier, she and the other newly-elected and re-elected senators took the official oath together, gathered... Read more
Partisanship at its best serves the best of political purposes. Election finagling is really very rare in the United States. President Trump’s various claims of millions of illegal votes stolen, illegally cast, added, or re-apportioned in 2016 are simply silly. Sore losers I’ve heard of, but a sore winner? There are occasions, though, where exceptions are said to happen. The Chicago myth that 100,000 or so added Cook County votes in 1960 elected John Kennedy to the presidency (which on... Read more
A Facebook memory showed up this morning. Some days that’s pleasant. Other days, it is an abrasion on the mind. It was eight years ago today my mother’s hip shattered and dropped her to the floor. She was 87. I had taken notice of it on my FB feed and requested prayer. Facebook remembered. Thirty days later, on the day she turned 88, she was in a nursing home. I signed required documents acknowledging that physical therapy was suspended. For... Read more
My blog title is entirely whimsical but not without a playful seriousness. Which I guess is what whimsical means. Anyway I am a former Lutheran pastor. I was ordained in 1980 at age 33 and I served in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America as a parish pastor for thirty years; and four years in the North American Lutheran Church as a district dean (think auxiliary bishop), having left the ELCA. In 2014 I resigned from the North American Lutheran... Read more
The Vatican II Lutheran
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In