I was eleven when my family moved to Pittsburgh. It was the biggest cultural shift I’ve experienced, before or since—my first moves stayed east of the Mississippi and mostly south of the Mason-Dixon line; Texas’ cultural idiosyncrasies have only revealed themselves to me over decades. Deep South to industrial North: radically different. Including and especially […]
Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. –James 4:14 Thanks, Leon, for blogging this passage…so I could snag it for my blog! I was going to also include the Paul McCartney song “Another Day,” but […]
Long ago and far away, when I was new to the U.S. workforce, I handled paperwork for a large company’s training department. A perq of the job was that, if “real participants” cancelled or weren’t available, we got to fill in at the last minute. That was how I got into their Time/Design class, which […]
Our experience of sisters fighting is not much like what I’ve seen or heard about other places. When the girls were little-little, we weren’t around each other that much. That sounds worse than it was—with two full-time working-at-an-office parents, the girls were with their caregivers from 7:30a-5:30p. And as it worked out, they were […]
by Pat Bennett We believe in God the maker and shaper of our pathways; who sent Jesus to show us the narrow way, and who is the beginning and end of our travelling. We believe in Jesus Christ the sharer of our flesh; who entered and experienced the human journey, and who walks beside us […]
I used my lone focus-block of the day to begin work on my final essay for Intro to New Testament. I know you’re all relieved about that, because you were beginning to worry about whether I would miss my May 19 deadline. </sarcasm> The corollary is that I didn’t write for you. What I did […]
“He’s also a hafiz, one of that revered group who has memorized the entire Qur’an. Not to mention that he’s a mellifluous qari, or Qur’an reciter. So deeply is the Qur’an embedded in Imam Akcin’s spirit that his conversation is constantly broken into by spontaneous quotations from it, quotations always directed to whatever issue might […]
I am a progressive, feminist, Anglo woman of faith… and I have a big problem with “deserve.” So much so that I juxtaposed this clip: with this baby: just because someone commented to me that Baby deserves to be loved. ! Okay, for starters, I have newly discovered the grandparent secret regarding unconditional love: my […]
Funny how clearly, easily it showed itself to me. Odd that I could ever see it at all. There I was, sitting at the dining table, empty lunch dishes around me. I had read webpages for an hour after I returned from the gym, cleaned myself up, and made lunch… where I read some more. […]
Riding to class today, I heard a radio DJ sharing our weather report. He gloomily said the rain chance for tomorrow, which had been high, is dropping. And it will likely be another exquisitely sunny day here in Central Texas, with a high temperature around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I thought, “I wish it would rain.” […]
