Easter Enigmas

You would think after so long a time we’d be better at this. Lent, Holy Week, Easter. They’ve been observed for some two millennia—and for however many years in our own lives—yet by now, two days after Easter Sunday, we may wonder what it was all about. Well, let me speak for...
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“Total Anarchy”: How Is a Human Being to Live?

Some old friends were in town recently, so I joined them for lunch. Among their number was Miroslav Marinov, a Bulgarian intellectual who fled his communist homeland long ago and settled in Canada, where he still resides today. One of the most erudite people I know, Miro, as we...
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A Patina of Prayer

After a meeting of local clergy leaders hosted by our parish (on the lawn, due to Covid restrictions), one of the pastors mentioned that he had never been inside our church. Knowing that most clergy enjoy snooping around places of worship, I offered him a brief tour of our...
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Unfinished Writing

  Spring, 2019: I started off the day with a rather reluctant middle-school Sunday School class. The hour was early for them, and they had not yet fully realized their daily resurrection from the dead. At some point, in a moment of attitude (adult version, I can be almost as...
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Heaven on Earth

  A curious path now leads us away from hell and punishment. It skirts nimbly heaven and reward, then ends in the ephemeral cloud of heaven on earth. Its achievements are stupefying. They are nothing less than a repudiation of the afterlife’s heaven and hell plus the...
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