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Saturday night I cooked dinner for a group of women in our church who have gotten together monthly for many years to share a meal and talk about their lives and their faith. They invited me to come do a sort of cooking lesson and then stay for the discussion.
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Last summer, Ginger and I got to go to Dyersville, Iowa and visit the farm where Field of Dreams was filmed. The baseball diamond is still there, between the house and the cornfield. We were two of only a handful of people walking around, so we played catch, me on
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My family moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia in 1957. Back then, that required sailing on a passenger freighter from New York to Beira, Mozambique, which took thirty-two days. I turned one in the course of the journey from Texas to Africa. None of us had much idea of what we
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A friend gave me a book for Christmas--One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. Because I received several books for Christmas, I didn’t get to start it until last Sunday morning. As I read the dustcover (you should always read the dustcover), I learned the volume I held
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Last Thursday night Ginger and I drove up the Hartford to meet our friend Christy and watch Baylor play UConn in basketball. The Huskies, perhaps the most famous women’s basketball program in the country, had won ninety-eight home games in a row. The Bears broke their streak, and didn’
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I had to learn how to get angry. My father grew up in a house where the weather of the family was one storm after another. He was determined my brother and I would not grow up in that kind of climate and so he and my mother made a
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The word magos can mean “a magus, sage of the magician religion, magician, astrologer, wise one;” but, probably because it was King James who authorized the version that has most affected our telling of Jesus’ birth, we have come to call them the Three Kings. They make one appearance in
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I preached this morning at North Haven Congregational Church. Here is what I had to say. ______________________________________ For a number of years now, I have marked the end of the year with a song by Counting Crows that begins a long december and there’s reason to believe maybe this year
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This morning I preached at our 8:30 service; our annual pageant took place at 10:00, so I didn’t have to do double duty. The passage for today was Matthew 1:18-25, which tells the story of Gabriel’s visit to Joseph. What follows is my manuscript, which
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I guess it is safe to say that my making soup for the carolers before they go out to sing on the Second Sunday of Advent is a tradition, since I have now done it for three Advents. I had recipes for two of the soups I made: Pumpkin Corn
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I deactivated my Twitter account last week, in part because I have never been able to fully understand how to use it, but mostly because I think it takes more than 240 characters to communicate well with one another. That our politicians have allowed themselves to use it as their
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I learned to write in Africa. The school was taught in English, which is a more layered story of conquest and colonialism. By the time I got to Lusaka Infants’ School, it was the only language taught. At the top corner of my desk was a hole that held an