I have been setting up a new office space on the second floor landing of our Garage Mahal home. My desk, an IKEA model put together by yours truly, the incompetent handy man, faces directly onto the roof of the main house of our property. But, magnificently, that roof is made wonderfully tiny, nay insignificant, by the stunning redwood tree that graces the front of our place, just off the street apparently named after its three redwoods that tower over... Read more

Anyone who speaks two or more languages knows all too well that all translations from one language to another are only interpretations, and necessarily complex and oft times disputed ones at that. This is true even when those languages are modern, living ones, where the nuanced meanings of the words can be evaluated by native speakers of those languages. How much more difficult is it when one or more of those languages are dead, not having been spoken for millennia?... Read more

Several weeks ago I said that my wife, Diana, and I were on our way to our New Mexico cabin high in the mountains of the Pecos wilderness in order to observe one of nature’s grandest displays—the fall leaf change. We chose a glorious year! When we arrived, there was only a hint of yellow above the 11,000 foot marker, just below the peak of Santa Fe Baldy. During the succeeding three weeks of our stay, the yellow drained down... Read more

I wrote several weeks ago that I was beginning a visit to our cabin high in the Santa Fe wilderness primarily in order to view the changing of the aspen leaves from green to gold. I am ecstatic to say that that mission has been accomplished! My wife and I have gazed daily at the ever-changing foliage as it has made its annual transformation. It has been glorious! Two days ago, we had a fluffy snowfall, a fact, I am... Read more

The key to understanding the book of Job is a careful evaluation of the speeches of YHWH in chaps. 38-42. It is nearly impossible to assess the vast number of analyses of these chapters and the wildly different ways interpreters have understood them. Anything I might have to say has surely been said before by numerous commentators, but what I can offer, I think, is a close connection to the material that precedes the speeches of God and how important... Read more

My wife and I actually visited Hiroshima, Japan over 30 years ago, but the memory is still quite fresh. That infamous building hulk was very close to ground zero of the world’s first military atomic bomb, a picture that has appeared again and again in countless journals, books, and magazines in the 73 years since the bomb was dropped. That picture came back to my mind with renewed horror and freshness as I read the monumental account of just how... Read more

With this second week on the book of Job, the lectionary connectors offer us a rather peculiar text. It is Job’s response to the third speech of Eliphaz (Chapter 22), and frankly is the final clear speech in the much disputed third cycle of speeches. Job 24-27 is a hodge-podge of pseudo speeches, seemingly ascribed to the wrong speakers, the friends sounding rather like Job (25) and Job sounding rather like the friends (26). Oceans of scholarly ink has been... Read more

Today we will address the first of four weeks on the book of Job. I have revealed in my past blogs on the lectionary my long acquaintance with the book of Job. I wrote a long, and I fear essentially unreadable, dissertation on the book in 1974, being convinced in a typically arrogant graduate student way that I had at last solved the mysteries of the book. In a word, I hadn’t. Then in 1999 I published a book, Preaching... Read more

Judge Brett Kavanaugh and I have much in common, though that commonality on the surface appears highly unlikely. Obviously,  we swim in vastly different sized ponds. He went to an elite boys’ school, Yale College, and Yale Law School, and since his law degree has moved inexorably up the judicial ladder, arriving most recently at a prestigious Court of Appeals, and is now poised to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. I went to public schools through High... Read more

I have for my entire life wanted to participate in one of nature’s grandest displays—the change from green leaves to yellow in the fall. I have several times witnessed the full force of the yellow aspen leaves that surround my cabin in the heart of the Santa Fe National Forest, near the back-packing haven, the Pecos Wilderness. However, I have never had the opportunity to observe the slow, daily changeover from green to yellow. The sight of the full-bore yellow... Read more