The gentlemen I’ve been visiting in my local jail for the past decade live a daily existence, I’ve often considered, not unlike monks in the monastery I’ve also visited. They don’t have their wives or girlfriends with them. They all wear the same plain garment—not black robes, but old red scrubs. Their hair often grows…

In the aftermath of three large hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) the news has been filled with stories of communities recovering, trying to survive after the devastating impact of these incredible storms. Despite a lot of discouraging news, I have been moved by the reports of neighbors helping neighbors, strangers fishing each other out of…

It’s barely even summer and already, in our house it is the Summer of the Guys. Our son is thirteen now, and in the last few months, the world has opened to him: he and his two best neighborhood friends start planning the day almost as soon as it has started. Freed to stay at…

When I went to seminary, there was concern. Friends whispered. Had I gone rogue? Or worse: been “saved”? Would I suddenly start dropping things like washed in the blood into regular conversation? Admittedly, the calling to serve the church was sudden and powerful, like lightning. I had always considered myself a Christian, even if I…

My father held the wall to work his way from the bed to the couch, avoiding the ship’s bell protruding from the wall. He was sick—the kind of sick that meant out of work too. It was his adrenal system, or his pineal gland, or a hormonal imbalance, depending on the doctor. And it was…

Calamity Jane lumbered around Deadwood in fringed buckskins, spitting, cursing, and waving her whiskey flask in the shadows of the Black Hills. And I want to be more like her. Guns scare me, of course. Animal skins give me the willies, and more than a sip of hard liquor gets me coughing. Deadwood’s very existence…