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...