Pastoral Meanderings

In 1974 I was a student in my junior year of college worried about what was happening to the church body in which I had hoped to serve.  A c...

From churches to mission societies there was a profound movement to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the continent of Africa in the last ...

It often seems simplistic and naive to say the suffering flows from sin but the reality is that sin is not simply about doing wrong but also...

By the time I entered my teenage years nearly 85% of all those in America between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were, or had been, ma...

  In the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano , there is a comment and a sort of warning regarding the election for US President...

I grew up in the generation in which youth group at church was pretty tame and pretty lame.  We went roller skating once in a blue moon and ...

You know it is bad when they sell their prime real estate in search of smaller and cheaper digs.  So the Lutheran Church in Australia has so...

    It is worth your time. . . Thanks, old friend, for your good words!  

Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco was one of the many places of worship I visited in choir tours in college.  It was and is an impr...

  Though it is not alone (Fisk University has tried various ways to sell or lease its own valuable art collection), Valparaiso has now suc...

The right to happiness is not merely an American one but has become the universal right acknowledged by all and demanded by all.  Long befor...

No, this is not about boy bands from the past.  It is rather about the way that boys are raised to become men or, as we have found today, no...

It is the mark of children that they confuse wants with needs.  They want candy or a toy or whatever and so they address their parents or gr...

In that old Otto Preminger movie The Cardinal , there is a great line in which the bishop says to the priest: "the priesthood is not so...

I grew up in a very small parish in the middle of a cornfield in Northeastern Nebraska. It was never large and had no heyday to look back to...

The worst thing we have done to the Scriptures is to make this a book of weak and superficial words, words that require something from us an...

Over the years I have chronicled some of the vestment ideas gone bad -- from crocheted stoles to every other oddity I have encountered.  The...

Thanks to the idea of one of our DCEs some years ago, we give to the baptized a banner to hang on the wall of their room.  It has their name...

Having come off the series of John 6 Gospel readings for Series B, I am more and more convinced that it is nearly impossible to meet these t...

Don't get me wrong.  I think explanations are good.  I am all in favor of transparency.  I like it when I understand why something is wh...