Whether installed by election, by hereditary right, or by power of arms, of all the rulers humankind has ever had, none is so venerated or cited or—and this is important—none so forgiven by history as is Solomon. Faced with the…

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Tomorrow is the autumnal equinox and, with its coming, summer officially ends. I have greatly enjoyed these “Summer Sundays” postings and, even more, the letters and e-mails that have resulted. I’ll be moving, 5 October 2008, to explorefaith.net, where I’ll…

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Once upon a time there was a house…

Anything that begins with such words as that usually carries with it the implicit promise that a tale is about to be told. “Once upon a time” rarely is a vehicle for conveying factual or objective truth. Rather, we have learned to [...]

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I am going to preach this morning. Actually, in all probability I will be preaching by the time you read this. I will not be away from home in some alien pulpit, though, but at home in my own parish and among those whom I love. I won’t preach, of course, [...]

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Christ Episcopal Church in Ponte Vedra, Florida, is the kind of church every pastor, rector, or preacher dreams of. It’s got children running about everywhere. It’s building yet another parking lot for reasons that are [...]

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I’m not much for talismans or religious tokens in the usual sense of those things. I wear around my neck every day of my life a chain with four emblems or medals on it. One is a Celtic cross given me on my 65th birthday by my favorite college chum from more than a half-century ago. One is [...]

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There’s a great deal of conversation these days about the nature of human consciousness and, as a related issue, about the true definition of “human” and how it can be best described. There’s so much such conversation, in fact, that it is essentially impossible (especially [...]

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One of the great recent joys of my life has been a thing called “Beer and Bible,” which happens every other Tuesday night at a small neighborhood pub in Memphis called, appropriately enough, Kudzu’s. Kudzu, our bar’s namesake, is the South’s most [...]

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Next Wednesday is the Feast of the Transfiguration. What that means is that next Wednesday is a major holy day for Christians like me who fall into what is commonly referred to as the “liturgical” category of the faith. That rather ponderous label is a [...]

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Folks in my line of work … i.e., writers in the field of religion … do a lot of talking and lecturing during the fall, winter, and spring months when schools are in session and everyone more or less agrees…

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Folks in my line of work … i.e., writers in the field of religion … do a lot of talking and lecturing during the fall, winter, and spring months when schools are in session and everyone more or less agrees that vacation time is over and done with for another [...]

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A Sunday or two ago, I made mention of — more to the truth, wrote a whole

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Tomorrow is Bastille Day. We Americans don’t take much notice of that these days, but once there was a time when we did. Once was the time, especially as the storm clouds of World War II were gathering over us, when school children and working folk alike [...]

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July 4 weekend! Now this is a holiday! We won’t have another one until Labor Day, but that doesn’t even matter right now. What matters is that this is the last day of a glorious three days of blessed interruption. Thank goodness for all such favors.

I [...]

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In the days of my childhood, summer was the season of the big-tent revivals. More than any other of the myriad things that summer could be and was, it was the revivals that were for me the major descriptor of…

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In the days of my childhood, summer was the season of the big-tent revivals. More than any other of the myriad things that summer could be and was, it was the revivals that were for me the major descriptor of what a complete and proper summer was. This rather [...]

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Welcome to summer. Officially and totally summer in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s certifiably summer by every means of our accounting, be it psychological or [...]

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Officially speaking and despite what we may all be thinking about the June heat wave the nation is plowing its way through right [...]

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