Category: Theological reflection
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The First Sunday of Advent
Year A – November 30, 2025 Note: I am beginning a series of blogging on the Sunday Eucharistic lectionary—the Revised Common Lectionary as used in the Episcopal Church—paired with artwork. This project has its origins in bulletins I used to make for St. Andrew’s Church, Livonia, although I wrote much…
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Bearing Scars and Good News
Homily for the Feast of St. Luke (observed), Evensong, 10/19/2025Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit (detroitcathedral.org) This morning we observed yesterday’s feast of St. Luke, and we continue that observance this evening. St. Luke’s day has long been important in this cathedral—which is why we can move it to a…
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Whose is the kingdom, the power, and the glory?
Holy Week is here again: that annual liturgical reminder of the horrors humans are capable of. We tame it—make it about the provision of a meek and mute divine sacrificial victim to atone for our personal sins. It’s such a familiar story. Our hymnals automatically flip themselves open to “All…
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I disagree with myself ALL THE TIME.
In grad school, I attended an inter-religious consortium of seminaries and institutes. One term while taking a class over at the Unitarian Universalist seminary, I recall telling a UU classmate that I am a “Trinitarian Universalist.” That might well be a fancy way to say “Episcopalian,” although I doubt it.…
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Even the Dogs Get Crumbs
The Gospel lection for this Sunday (September 8, 2024, in the Episcopal edition of the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Proper 18) is Mark 7:24-27. It includes two pericopes, including one of the Gospel accounts of the story of a Gentile woman whose child is ill: Jesus set out and…
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In the Beginning Was the Word
And God said, “Letthere be light!”And there was light, or would have been, had God been crafting a cosmos intelligible to the Bronze Age mind, or mine. Scientists—specifically, astrophysicists—tell us that we can detect light from the Big Bang, the background microwave radiation all around us. We can see into…
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First Sunday in Lent
I am not a fan of Lent. There is altogether too much breast-beating for my taste. Or, rather, for my mental and spiritual health. I’m trying to recast it in my own mind, because I know it means so much more. As one of the Proper Prefaces for Lent says,…
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Trying so hard to be ordinary
It’s a weird calendar this year for us church folk. Christmas Eve was on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, and Ash Wednesday will be on Valentine’s Day again. This past Saturday, January 6, was the Feast of the Epiphany—a feast you would think would be transferred to the nearest Sunday,…
The Sound 