There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is. -Albert Einstein My colleague, Jonathan Thomas, preached a provocative sermon yesterday. He challenged our basic assumptions about God—where God is and isn’t; what God gets involved in; the occasions, moments, places where […]
Nature/Creation
Wildness is Necessity
If summer is come, June 21st, can vacation be far behind? Unless we’re in for a stay-cation, that means getting out of town, finding our way somewhere else. When we live in town and work in the city, we often head for someplace far from “civilization,” remote, wild. I always develop palpitations when I reach […]
The Beautiful Impossible
Unbelieving types often wonder how in the world we can believe in “miracles” that seem so impossible. What’s “impossible” anyway? I was just reading some galactic facts that blew a brain circuit. Get a load of this. “Fourteen billion years ago the entire universe we observe today—containing upwards of 100 billion galaxies—was contained in […]
The Lorica of St. Patrick
As the world celebrates St. Patrick’s day, we pause to remember Ireland’s great patron who has been adopted by the world. Born in Roman Britain, kidnapped by slave traders from Ireland prowling the Welsh coastline, enslaved for years as a shepherd in Ireland, Patrick had no formal education, but his searing experience created within him […]
“It’s Groundhog Day!”
(We’ll get to Gobbler’s Knob in a moment.) Today—February 2nd—is a big turning point. It’s a great cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In ancient, agricultural societies it was regarded as the beginning of spring—the time for first turning the soil in preparation for March planting. There were prayers and […]
Your Own Time Zone
My daily almanac tells me this: On this date in 1883, standard time zones were established in the United States and Canada. The railroad was the driving force behind the establishment of consistent time zones, and it was called Standard Railway Time (SRT). Prior to the use of SRT, all towns set their own time, […]