Monthly Archives: June 2019

The Children’s Hour

Monday I am retooling a post that I wrote five years ago to apply to yesterday’s visit to my four grandchildren. As the three oldest, Esmé (7), Etta (5), and Eden (3), swarmed over me on their playroom floor, I recalled Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” It too features an elder man being swarmed […]

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Why We Fear the Outsider

Spiritual Sunday My friend Sue Schmidt recently alerted me to a homily, by associate rector the Rev. David Henson at Trinity Episcopal Church in Asheville, North Carolina, that highlights a curious moment following one of Jesus’s exorcisms. Rev. Henson draws on To Kill a Mockingbird, Home Alone, and unspecified Harry Potter characters to explain the […]

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Fantasy Lit Grappling with Drug Addiction

Friday Canadian author Lauren Davis has sent me her latest book, a fantasy portal quest that grapples with the problem of drug addiction. She knew it would appeal to me because of how it draws on fantasy literature, especially Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, to explore ways of responding to this gut-wrenching issue. The protagonist […]

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Comic Haikus Launch 2020 Election

Thursday Jason Gilbert, a producer at Comedy Central, has written a series of superb haikus on the Democratic presidential candidates, twenty of whom are splitting last night and tonight for the season’s first debate. As often with political comedy, it’s funniest when someone else’s ox is getting gored. Nevertheless, we need to laugh at our […]

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Migrant Kids in a Dickensian Nightmare

Wednesday As the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border continues to horrify the nation, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist comes to mind. There you have another child caught up in a nightmare where ideology overwhelms basic humanity. Whereas most of us see the death of a child as overwhelmingly tragic, it serves the agendas […]

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Gulliver in Trumpland

Tuesday So now Donald Trump, after ramping up war talk with Iran, is magnanimously claiming to be a moderate by calling off his airstrike. Killing 150 Iranians, he tells us, would be a disproportionate response to the downing of an American drone. This time he’s right. Less excusable is that he got us into the […]

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Our National Health Requires Immigrants

Monday As we watch the Trump administration trample all over American values with its treatment of asylum seekers at our southern border, it’s worth reminding ourselves how much we rely on immigrants. I’ve been reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, an Ethiopian immigrant of Indian parentage, who at one point has a character expound […]

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Is Loving Our Neighbor Asking Too Much?

Spiritual Sunday This past week, I attended a special Bible study session on the Good Samaritan parable where Sewanee’s Rev. Amy Lamborn emphasized just how radical God’s second great commandment is. Jesus tells the story in such a way, she pointed out, that call out his audiences prejudices. At a time when we are turning […]

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Celebrating the Sun

Friday – Summer Solstice Cultures and civilizations since time immemorial have celebrated the summer solstice, with many magnificent works of architecture (including Stonehenge, the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu, the Egyptian pyramids, the Mayans’ Chichen Itza, and Scotland’s Ring of Brodgar) constructed so as to mark the date. Spiritual author Starhawk discusses the […]

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