We could start this sermon virtually anywhere. We could begin with the wailing women in Pharaoh’s Egypt, lamenting their massacred Hebrew babies, even as little Moses floats serenely in his boat of bulrushes. We could begin in New York City on the eleventh day of...

A couple of times a year I follow the example of Jesus and retreat from people to engage in a couple of days of isolation, fasting, prayer and work. My dog usually travels with me on these occasions, and on this particular trip I was accompanied by my golden retriever...

Some years ago we were on vacation and riding home after a dinner out at the beach when my daughter Clara looked at her phone and exclaimed, “Robin Williams has died. He apparently committed suicide.” Such news sparked a spirited family conversation, all of us...

Years ago, the writer Ernest Hemmingway came across a newspaper ad that in his opinion formed a perfect, if piercingly sad, six-word short-story. The notice read: “Free baby shoes. Never been used.” There is a similarly sad short story in the New Testament concerning...

September 11, 2001 seared the American soul. Images once reserved for big-budget Hollywood epics leaped from disaster film fantasy into horrific reality before our eyes, as commercial jets were misemployed as missiles to smash into twin towers that represented the...