Reflections on the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference
Last Sunday we concluded four days devoted to the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference, we have been involved in for the past seven years. This year’s theme was “Longing for Peace/Exploring …
Remembering Jim Fowler
My dear friend of fifty years, James W. Fowler III, died on October 16 after a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease that lasted over 12 years. Jim was famous for his …
The Great Migration
Like the rest of you I have been trying to get my mind and heart around the explosive migration of refugees from war, political collapse, and drought that has engulfed …
Mortality, Autonomy, and Craft
I have been reading two books lately about two very different topics that engage the same basic question: How can we act as genuine individuals in a society that treats …
Restoring our Memories, Restoring Ourselves
The work of remembering takes patience, persistence, and an attention to detail. So I am finding out as I painstakingly sort through almost four hundred photographs from my mother’s stay …
Forgiveness
I can’t get it out of my mind and I don’t want to. On June 19, Dylan Roof, the confessed killer of nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal …
Journeying Toward Reconciliation
Last October I wrote about the development of Reconciling Conversations at First United Methodist Church in Waynesville, here in western North Carolina. At the time, we had put together a …
Craft Between You and Me
There’s a connection between woodworking and writing. One of them is the attention to craft. I am presently making a long-overdue desk for my son Eric, who has been using …
Persons with Dignity
As the Supreme Court wound through oral arguments about same-sex marriage this past Tuesday (Obergefell v. Hodges), I was struck by the way debates over what it is to be …
Searching for Identity on Cyprus
We returned almost a month ago from two weeks on Cyprus after a rich tour of Egypt’s ancient sites. As we flew over the Mediterranean from Cairo to Larnaca, Cyprus, …
Memories in Egypt
People my age are acutely aware of their memories and the work of memory. It starts with our own effort to figure out what all these pictures are that were …
Travel Update
Dear Readers, The reason that you are not receiving any extensive blog entries is that we are traveling in Egypt and Cyprus in the month of February. Yes, Egypt is …
Violence, Speech, and Religion
Like you, I have been trying to comprehend the murders of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, of innocent shoppers in Paris, and of two thousand people in Nigeria—all at the …
Sawdust and Soul
Over the past fifteen years I have carried on a lively conversation about woodworking with my good friend John de Gruchy—he in South Africa’s Western Cape, I in the mountains …
Of Patriots and Matriots
For us Northern Hemisphere folks who follow the Greco-Latinate calendar, this is a time of endings and new beginnings, of passage into darkness and out into light, from the dying …