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

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

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,

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,”

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,

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