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The subtitle to David Whyte’s book Consolations is The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. One of the words he unpacks is Istanbul. Though it makes me want to go find my They Might Be Giants CDs, I have never thought of Istanbul--the city or the word--as
recipes
Two of the great unexplained shortages of our unfortunate isolation is flour and yeast. For some reason, everyone decided not only that they wanted to bake bread, but that they needed enough yeast to last until early 2025. Bread is one of those things you don’t just decide to
recipes
One of the ironies of my life is that I am married to a woman named Ginger who does not, for the most part, like ginger--except when it comes in a good ginger molasses cookie. When i think of ginger cookies, I think of ginger snaps with the spice and
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I finished the Gospel of Mark in the new translation by David Bentley Hart. I also finished a chapter in Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno, which was written in 1912 and translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch. The two translations are a century apart and aimed at
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Tomorrow, April 21, 2020, is our thirtieth wedding anniversary. In the course of our marriage we have lived in five cities and four states, Ginger has served four UCC churches, we have had eight residences, eight Schnauzers, and I have had five different careers. I have lost track of how
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I am still getting used to Sundays being a day with space. Almost thirty years of being married to a pastor has me well-conditioned to Sunday being a work day, even if it’s not my job. But for the last six Sundays, we have had time to be together
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I started reading the Gospel of Mark yesterday as a part of my morning reading time. I got a copy of David Bentley Hart’s new translation and took it as an invitation to dive back into the Gospels once again. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and
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We have a standing joke around our house: Ginger likes blow-up movies and I like movies where nothing happens. What I mean is I like character-driven movies. I like characters. Two of my favorite TV shows with great characters are not happening this week. Schitt’s Creek, which is a
recipes
Tonight’s post is a continuation of my occasional series, “Cookies with Stories.” As I have mentioned more than once most of my recipes come from my cookie-baking days in Durham, North Carolina. Tonight’s cookie is the first one with a Guilford story attached to it. We moved to
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My family and I left Africa for good on my sixteenth birthday. I turned one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Africa, so there was some poetry in our departure, but it was hard on all of us. We all thought we were going
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It has been my practice over the last several years to sort of disappear from these pages after Lent. My absence has never been intentional, but it has been consistent. As the reality of our unfortunate isolation became more apparent, I decided several week ago that I would keep writing
lenten journal
A Holy Saturday Christian. I learned the term from Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest and Hebrew Bible Scholar who teaches at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth. In a “pastoral letter” she wrote to her students after they had dealt with particularly violent biblical texts she said, I am a