I took a nap in the day and dreamed I was volunteered by someone to cook dinner for a woman with a newborn. I was to cook for her four times just after the birth of her child, and I was sort of bellyaching about it to a friend, the expense and the time. But…

A few weeks ago I saw a hummingbird on my back porch for the first time. It hovered in front of me, just a few feet from my face, as if it desperately wanted to be noticed. I get it, I said aloud. And then I gasped, because it really was so beautiful, shiny and…

Ying Quartet, l-r: David Ying (cello), Janet Ying (violin), new first violinist Robin Scott, and Phillip Ying (viola) outside Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, Eastman School of Music March 23, 2015 // photo by J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester Of all the arts, music is the most difficult to write about. Maybe because…

Last spring I promised my congregation a sermon about “words and the Word.” That was my clever title for a sermon that was a long time coming. My sermons tend to take a long time to marinate. I can pinpoint precisely when I started working on that one. I was nineteen, and deeply committed to…

Suddenly, just as I was starting to get a little bit comfortable in my role as Brother Morgan in the New Order of Saint Francis at Saint Anthony’s Cathedral, an Ecumenical Catholic Church in Detroit, the children came. No one knows why the children came, and no one asked the children to come. They just…

“The audience doesn’t want to hear you make points,” insists Tracy Morgan in “The Comedian,” the first episode of the rebooted Twilight Zone series helmed by Jordan Peele. He might as well deliver the line with a wink, as that’s what the show has always done: critique human failings, and often, current events, in ways…

Recently at the ancient Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, monks gathered to introduce a new version of an old deity: Mindar, an android embodying Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Standing over six feet tall, most of her body the aluminum skeleton of a robot, bolts and rivets all on view, Mindar is honest about her…

“So who mothers the motherswho tend the hallways of mothers, the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers, who mend the eyes of mothers” –Catherine Barnett, “Chorus” On Easter, I go to my son’s father’s house—Sundays are one of his days—and watch my son enjoy his basket, which I spun from thin air the night…

We hear it before we see it. Sometimes, it’s the somber snap of the funereal snare. Sometimes, it’s the ladies’ choral recitations of the rosary, scratching through a tinny speaker. Then there they are, processing past our apartment building. It is Good Friday, the day of Christian upheaval and ruined expectations, and in a moment,…

The cell phone on the conference room table in London buzzed in the middle of the meeting, and the man glanced down at it, mid conversation. “My God,” he said. “They’ve arrested Assange.” A block away, at the Palace of Westminister, protesters on the sidewalk held signs either for or against Brexit: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!…