As part of our tourist rounds in Chicago my wife and I visited the Art Institute, which is far too large to take in in a single day. As happens every time I go to a large museum, by the time we walked out I was in a state of melancholy existential astonishment. One installation…

Contingency…subject to chance…uncertain…right down to the molecular level. — Christian Wiman It is one of the most confounding paradoxes of parenting: do we show our children, or do we tell them? From that question, of course, the nuance and degree of difficulty increase rapidly. When and how to show? When and how to tell? Watching…

Early on Friday morning, the first full day of my recent trip to Israel with Congregation Beth Ha Tephila, Asheville, NC, six of the forty-three participants gathered on a momentarily quiet Metzitzim Beach near the Tel Aviv port for twenty minutes of mindfulness practice. When we finished, we noted, just to the south of us,…

For the past several days—until today, alas—we’ve been having a spell of entirely uncharacteristic weather in the Washington, D.C. area. The days have been in the 70s and the nights, pure bliss: in the high 60s, a temperature for open windows and a thick breeze that feels like it’s straight from the Atlantic, and I…

The day is hot and musty but everyone is celebrating. After all, everyone can enjoy a small town fireworks display, right? I used to think so. But in revelatory moments, the sheen of this small town—with its beautiful park and festivities—is pulled back to reveal what was always present. Life isn’t always so bright for…

The line lurched forward one vehicle at a time, halogen halos radiating from headlights. Although it was eleven o’clock at night, I could not help but think of the funeral processions I saw as a boy, cars coursing through town in the daytime with lights aglow. As I sat in the drive-thru lane at Taco…

I’ve never really been into crosses.  Like fire hydrants or Starbucks, there are so many, I don’t even see them. Sermons or songs that ask me to meditate on the cross might as well ask me to meditate on the church snack table because that’s where my mind wanders as I wait for the cross,…

Fridays used to be pizza and a movie nights, growing up. My dad would bring home a ridiculously greasy pizza from a little place in the next town over called Pizza Stop. It was on one of these nights, as I recall, that we watched DeMille’s Ten Commandments. As good churchgoing Christians, we knew the…

Thinking of the psalms as a way to cycle through the entire range of human experience, I recently brought them with me into juvenile detention. The kids there, on Sunday afternoons, shuffle through automated doors wearing orange jumpsuits and pink booties and take their seats shyly around bolted-down steel tables with me. These are boys…

The first time my wife and I worshipped in an Episcopal church, we were members in The United Methodist Church, the denomination that baptized, confirmed, and eventually called me to ministry. On any given Sunday across the globe, you can find a United Methodist congregation worshipping. And at least in the North American churches, there…