Today is World Kindness Day. As I've been preparing to write this final blog before taking a year's break to focus on my doctoral work, I have been thinking about kindness-- about what is kind and what is not kind.…
Reading The Magician's Nephew last in The Chronicles of Narnia (just after The Last Battle) is a little like reading the book of Genesis last in Scripture (just after Revelation). It's the order I prefer, though; perhaps simply because this…
Brother Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell's recent post on The Twelve, Slouching Toward Augustine, ignited some cognitive dissonance for me. (And cognitive dissonance is good, as Steve reminded me when I told him I would be engaging him in this virtual dialogue!) In…
As regular readers of my Twelve contributions know, I read to my daughters every night from the diaries I kept when I was their age. A couple of nights ago, I found a little gem from September 29, 1988. Tucked…
This past Saturday morning, I attended a workshop at The Colossian Forum's annual conference. The workshop was titled Beyond Good Intentions: The Practices of Calm Presence. The presenter, Trisha Taylor, has been a coach to me and a friend for…
When it comes to "what to say" and "what not to say" to someone who is grieving, I have come to learn that prepositions matter. And so do adverbs. American author, Nora McInerny's husband, Aaron, died of cancer in 2014.…
I will always remember the first birthday card my new mother-in-law gave to me as her daughter-in-law. I don't remember the card itself, or the message written in it. Rather, I remember the envelope and the names she wrote on…
This Sunday afternoon, I will be officiating the wedding of a young woman in my congregation. Given that she is a philosopher and a linguist, studying for her PhD at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, I wasn't surprised…
Note: If a film in which two socially awkward men make up paddleball games, do jigsaw puzzles, watch kung-fu movies, and face a terminal diagnosis, appeals to you, then bookmark this post, go watch the movie, Paddleton, on Netflix, and…
A number of months ago, I wrote a reflection on being written into the story, inspired by Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee's dialogue in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers. They had paused mid-mission to wonder "what sort of tale" they…
