The Bouquet
Most every Sunday Ruth or Lily Janousek hands me a drawing on the way out the door. I have quite a collection.Lily and Ruth are budding theologians. They may not know that about themselves, but that’s...
View ArticleThe Stones Are Singing
Albert Camus once said that your life is “the slow trek to recover the two or three simple images in whose presence [your] heart first moved.”Sebastian Moore recovered one of those images after he had...
View ArticleI Wish We Were All That Crazy
I was a little like the Bishop James Pike last week with the story of Barabbas. I get like that sometimes. I’ve remembered to pull my pants on to take the dogs for a walk, but in every other way, I can...
View ArticleA Song for Each Kind of Day
Two years ago during my step-daughter’s final months with terminal cancer, I spent three days in quiet reflecton at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN. Worshiping with the Benedictines was part of...
View ArticleAn Ash Wednesday Question
What do we do? How do we stop this?“Motorists and walkers scattered in terror Monday night as a gunman fired two bursts of bullets at passing vehicles near an Oakdale grocery store, killing a...
View ArticleJust Leave Me Alone!
We are offered a significant choice, namely between two ways of being human. The difference between logical necessities or physical necessities and vital necessities is made clear in that in the latter...
View ArticleThe Garden Outside Pleasantville
In some way or other, I think it’s safe to say that we all have a kind of nostalgia for the innocence and purity of the Garden of Eden before what we call “the fall.” We have a sense that we are not...
View ArticleLittle Boys With Toys
The fact that North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong-un is threatening the world with nuclear holocaust does what World War I did to many theologians who had presumed that history was on a course of...
View ArticleIs There No Cure for These?
Last week, the Senate began a floor debate on gun control that brought to mind an earlier “floor debate” several months ago in Chaska, Minn.Ever since our Community Dialogue on “Gun Violence in...
View ArticleAfter Boston: Above and Beyond
The National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago has an unusual work of art.When visitors first enter the museum, they hear a sound like wind chimes coming from above them. Their attention is drawn upward...
View ArticleReflections Along the Way of Terminal Illness
Today, three years to the day after my daughter Katherine’s (“Katie’s”) death (May 9, 2010), we inter her cremains. “IT’S RAINING, IT’S POURING” was written the day we learned that Katie’s incurable...
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