With Hurricane Harvey barreling down on the Texas coast, with Galvestonians and Houstonians making their exodus north, I’m struck by the irony of this week’s lectionary text. The focus? The Nile River, which was famous for the floods that fueled the fertility of the famed Nile River Valley and fed the Nile delta. Many of […]

In the minute-by-minute debacle of modern American politics, it is easy to miss something important. For example, on Wednesday, when the headlines had to do with the CEO flight from Trump’s manufacturing and business councils, Trump officially terminated the Central Minors Program. According to the Washington Post, Obama responded to a spike in the number […]

Every year, without fail, we sang the chorus Jacob’s Ladder at church camp. Sung by a hundred Long Island high schoolers, it was interminable. (It never sounded like this. Wow!) We certainly had no idea this was a Negro Spiritual with a history that stretched back 150 years or so. So we sang it. We […]

Priscilla and I had three miscarriages before we had our daughter Chloe and son Jeremy. We waited, not decades, of course, but in the uncertainty of whether we could have children at all. Countless visits to doctors, to geneticists. Countless walks. Countless cups of coffee. Then Chloe was born after twenty-seven hours of labor—and whisked […]

When I was a kid, my older sisters would say, “He’s useless.” No. That’s not quite right. They were exasperated, so they’d sigh, “He’s use-less. MOM!” That’s better. No doubt I was the useless younger brother of two older sisters. I probably still am. Both of them are nurses, who have spent hours upon hours […]

When our son Jeremy was just a kid, he often set himself up in the living room and built Lego gas stations, space ships, and castles. Our living room, where he held sway, godlike over his creation, had six floor-to-ceiling windows, which he faced. This meant Jeremy had his back to me, as he sat, […]

When our son Jeremy was just a kid, he often set himself up in the living room and built Lego gas stations, space ships, and castles. Our living room, where he held sway, godlike over his creation, had six floor-to-ceiling windows, which he faced. This meant Jeremy had his back to me, as he sat, […]

When our son Jeremy was just a kid, he often set himself up in the living room and built Lego gas stations, space ships, and castles. Our living room, where he held sway, godlike over his creation, had six floor-to-ceiling windows, which he faced. This meant Jeremy had his back to me, as he sat, […]