Categories for Musings

Every people group has suffered racism in one form or another. This societal ubiquity doesn’t discriminate – people of all colors and religions, the educated and less educated, rich and poor, powerful and powerless are just as capable of bigotry. Racism is not always one direction – victims of racism can be racists themselves. Racism...

As the coronavirus pandemic gains devastating strides, sensible and anxious people impose self-isolation. Streets become vacuous. Businesses, large and small, shutter. Millions of laborers are laidoff. The New York Times calls it “the great empty.” Millions contract the virus; hundreds of thousands die. At this writing, in America alone, there are four-million people infected, 140,000...

In her sunset years, on a sun-filled late morning, my wife is full of wonders. In wonder, she fixes her imagination to wander the credulous confluence with four different husbands. She reminisces those many long years with each in gladness, grief, grace, and grit. Her assured smile betrays an efficacy. This is how she remembers...

Long ago, a Jewish widow mourned the deaths of her husband and two sons.*  Because of a famine, they had left Bethlehem of Judaea to settle in the land of Moab. The widow’s name was Naomi (pleasantness), but because of her afflictions she called herself Mara (bitterness). Her sons had taken Moabite wives. After her...

part 3   From Martin Luther to the Post-Modern Churches In the middle of the millennium, a crude, foul-mouth and tendentious German Augustinian monk took a hammer and nailed a parchment on the wooden door of his seminary. Scribbled on the parchment were 95 grievances, mainly his dyspepsia concerning the church’s sale of indulgences (They were...

part 2      From Mother Mary To the Church’s Great Schism  At the dawn of a new millennium, the Romans ruled the world as no other before or since. They also ruled Israel! The people of God once and again suffered the indignity of under another foreign power’s heavy boot. That infidel king had...

This muse is in three parts   part 1                           Pretext From the ancients to the moderns, the epochs of redemptive history seem to have an enigmatic pattern. For four millenniums, each transition follows a 500-year cycle. Heaven’s numinous decrees pierce the palls of earth...

As a high act of worship, the congregants stand to recite the liturgy of confession. I too stand and mouth those generic words out loud: . . . we confess that we have been unfaithful . . .  we have worshipped other gods . . . we have served our own self-interest. . . . ...

In those early days, being father to my young children was assiduously challenging. I seldom felt up to the parental task. Now that they are adults, that task is even more demanding. My soft soul requites its hard expectations. St Paul of the Bible is minimally helpful. He says as much: “Fathers, do not provoke...

Not long before his assassination, years after his “I have a dream” homily, Martin Luther King preached a sermon titled, “Unfulfilled Dreams.” His Scriptural text was I Kings, where King David wanted to build a temple to honor God. His dream went unfulfilled. Rev. King lamented that we all have dreams of erecting temples. We...