When I was a kid, one of my favorite books of all time was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Now, first of all, I was hooked on Bradbury. I never started a Bradbury book that I didn’t finish the same day. He was ut...
I’d like tell you to story about couple who were in a difficult marriage. They had only been married a year when the fighting started. By the end of the second year their fighting escalated, until one night Dan lost his temper and pushed Becky down t...
George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was out preaching one day, when some people decided to test him. In a set-up worthy of the Pharisees confronting Jesus, they handed him a tobacco pipe and dared him to smoke it.
There are many places in my life I consider pivot points, moments in time where the before and after were markedly different. Going away to college was one of those, getting ordained was another. Probably one of th...
When I was training as a pastor, I went through a…well, let’s just say it was an alternative route. I didn’t go to seminary before I was ordained. I did go later, but not until about twenty years into my ministry. Consequently there were some holes in my training. One...
In Shakespeare’s trilogy of plays on Henry the IV and Henry the V, the bard shows us a prince in his profligate youth, partying hard with prostitutes and thieves. In several poignant scenes and a couple flashbacks as well, we see Prince Hal turn his...
A few years ago I suffered a health crisis that literally took me to the brink. I felt like I had the flu nearly every day, it felt like my head was swollen up like a melon, and I had the symptoms of a powerful hangover that came and went over a three-day...
TRINITY SUNDAY 2017 | 2 Cor 13:11-13; Mat 28:16-20
Baruch Spinoza was one of the greatest thinkers in Western history. He was also Jewish, born into the small Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 17th century. He was widely regarded as a profound and original thinker in...
I just returned from Chile, and—as much as I love travelling—I was painfully reminded of just how difficult it is for me to leave home. The day before I leave is always difficult, as everything takes on a melancholy glow. It’s like I get powerfully homesick just before...
