Time is profoundly indifferent to human concerns. Its principal manifestations – contingency and causality, chance and law – operate independently of us, and resist our attempts to shape them to our own ends. Time’s arcs of growth and loss, joy…
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There’s a closer tie between artists and ordinary working people than the recent term “creative classes” would lead us to believe. Shakespeare, to the best of my knowledge, wrote to support himself and his family. The livelihoods of actors and…
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The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously claimed that “explanations must come to an end”. Through observation, deduction and intuition we can explain, and have in fact plausibly explained, a great deal about our world. That there is a world at all,…
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How do things human become real for us? How do we go from the management of relationships – our default mode – to participation in, say, the joy or the suffering of another? Or even our own? How – under…
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The piano tuner was at the house on Tuesday. He had been here only a few months before, but Martin could tell that some notes were going flat, others sharp. It’s a tedious process, piano tuning, and seemingly only those…
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“Let it go”: simple counsel that has gained a lot of currency in recent years, and for good reason. It calls on us to release our toxic assets, mostly anger in its various iterations, so we can focus on the…
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We remember. “I remember my sins today”, said Pharaoh’s cupbearer. “Do this in remembrance of me”, said Jesus to his apostles. “Remember the poor”, said the Jerusalem apostles to Paul. Remember. Remembering comes unbidden and unwelcome sometimes: the recollection of…
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Ascension Day is here, forty days following Easter Day. Years ago on Ascension Day I was flying from California to New Jersey to assist in the memorial Eucharist for a parishioner and friend. At 39,000 feet, and grieving, Ascension Day…
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At Grace’s Table Bible study for homeless neighbors this past Saturday, we focused on God’s light as that which “makes (something or someone) manifest”. I asked our guests what “making manifest” means, and one of them replied, “making something real”….
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Situated just below the Mason-Dixon line, Baltimore is the southernmost of northern cities and the northernmost of southern ones. Defenders of the South and of slavery drew the first blood of the Civil War here, throwing stones at Union troops…
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