Poor Sermon on a Pretty Day
“In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons. Or I would look out the windows. In winter, when the windows were closed, the church seemed…
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Winter is Coming
“A Hazy Shade of Winter” (listen to it here) was written by Paul Simon in the early sixties and appears on Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth studio album, Bookends (1968). The song is a metaphor for a life which draws upon the transition from fall to winter. It speaks of a person who once had great…
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Cullen Bohannan
The AMC original television series, “Hell on Wheels,” is the new “Breaking Bad.” Both feature anti-heroes: men for whom we cheer and hope will survive, at least until the next episode, even as they leave a trail of death behind them. Both Walter White (“Breaking Bad”) and Cullen Bohannan (“Hell on Wheels”) are men who…
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Live This Life (Follow-up to Terminal)
A few days ago my thoughts were focused on the fact that we are all “terminal.” Today my mind turns to the things within us that drive us to keep on living. We have likely all known someone who planned to “live a hard life, have a good time, and die young” only to be…
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Terminal
“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.”[1] In a culture that speaks little about death,…
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