The blogging on this mid-June, Monday morning will be a bit unusual in a couple of ways. First. it needs to begin with an announcement of a sort. Monday Morning Blogging is moving for the summer to a new eddress and becoming, again just for the summer, Summer Sundays Blogging. The reason for this is […]

It being a Monday morning, I am feeling either brave, or fool-hearty. I am not sure which. Either way, some folks will be offended-and I both dread and regret that; some will be affirmed-I am glad of that; and some will be indifferent-I deplore that, for the river of fire and debris I am about […]

There is a story-presumably true-about the late Karl Barth, theologian without equal. The story says that once, after he had finished one of his famous and always well-attended, public lectures, Barth was surrounded by a crowd of admirers, all of them wanting to ask just one more question. Dr. Barth, who was skilled in making […]

Flowers and birds and greening trees may be the sure signs of spring in the world at large; but in the world of my profession-in the world of book publishing and book publishers-the surest sign is the “Sales Conference.” The words are always said capitalized and with all the verbal emphasis that quote marks can […]

Sam and I live on The Farm In Lucy. There are several oddities about that sentence. As a statement, however, it is true, or at least it’s factually accurate. The most immediately apparent oddity in its facts is that Lucy really is a place, a small farming community in southwestern Tennessee, just slightly north and […]

Spring always gets good press everywhere, but it does especially well in south-western Tennessee where the mighty Mississippi is not only a river, but also our state line and our climate-control system. Our summers, being definitely southern and southern hot, are more intolerable even than most because of the Big Muddy and its gift of […]

 MONDAY MORNING BLOG - May 5, 2008
Though I have always been a devotee of T. S. Eliot and though I have always appreciated the poetic truth or message in his saying of April that it is the cruelest month, I have never taken his lines literally. Or I had not until last Wednesday when, on […]

This last week I received an e-mail that I think is of considerable relevance to all of us who are engaged with using and/or teaching the Sayings format of The Words of Jesus. The letter was no note, believe me; it was a letter, and it was entitled “A Dilemma!” with considerable and obvious sincerity. […]

We buried Rick Kersey on Low Sunday, which, this year, fell just three weeks ago on March 30th. As a term or phrase in the Church’s calendar of times, Low Sunday is always the Sunday after Easter and gets its name, so far as I can tell, from the fact that Easter has been so […]

 We are all—every one of us–pre-disposed to occupying a few chosen opinions with more passion than that with which we embrace most others. Each of us harbors those few, favored ideas that matter to us, despite the fact that those very same concepts rarely matter to anybody else in anything like the same configuration or […]