Category: Misc.
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Wedding Prayer at Christmas
Here is a prayer I said at the wedding of two friends today, Dec. 21, 2007. Congratulations to Mark and Shelley. Our Father in heaven, We thank you and praise you for all you are and for all you have done. You are the one who said in the beginning, “let light shine out of…
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You Can’t Spell
At a party recently, all the kids discovered a tetherball post in the host’s backyard. Waiting for the inevitable minor head injury that was sure to follow, I was musing pessimistically, “you can’t spell tetherball without the letters H, E, R, T.” Even worse, I thought, you can rearrange the letters in tetherball to spell…
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Mr. Collins Apologizes to Aspirin
MY DEAR BOTTLE OF BAYER, I feel myself constrained by your medical qualifications and my own recent physical indispositions of a cranial character, to call upon your services. Be assured, my dear Aspirin, that Mrs. Collins and myself sincerely desire the cessation, and that immediate, of the discomfort which has settled upon a man of…
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Praying on World AIDS Day
It’s World AIDS Day today. We tend to get faddish about issues. A buzz starts up about a particular need in the world, and many of us jump on a bandwagon of support, buying T-shirts and seeing movies and, sometimes, praying. Too often, our interest wanes as soon as the issue becomes ‘so last year.’…
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Passing the Time
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) wrote a wise book on The Study of Words in 1851. Trench is excited about words, and keen to spread that excitement to his readers. “Words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves,” he says on the first page of this long love-letter…
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Worst Coleridge Poem Ever!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest minds ever to write in English. But aside from the justly famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he didn’t manage to finish very many extended poems. That mind should have produced an English epic, but instead he produced Wordsworth –no small contribution to English letters. And aside…
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Coleridge the Wind Harp
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was evidently fascinated by Aeolian harps, string instruments played by the wind without human intervention. Just as novelties they are fascinating instruments, no doubt, but Coleridge saw in them an emblem of poetry itself. In fact, in one of his early poems, 1795’s The Eolian Harp, Coleridge takes the wind harp as…
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Genevieve Foster and the World of Columbus
Genevieve Foster is the author of a number of histories for young readers, published in the forties and fifties. Foster is a great story-teller who knows how to include all the information you’d expect in a kids’ history, but who also reads widely enough to gather up some surprises from primary text and older histories.…
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On ECUSA’s House of Bishops Statement (II)
Read Part 1 here. Here I examine the second half of the ECUSA House of Bishops statement. It reads: 5. We support the Presiding Bishop in seeking communion-wide consultation in a manner that is in accord with our Constitution and Canons. 6. We call for increasing implementation of the listening process across the Communion and…