—for Raven We All Live In the Same House On the weekends I live in Cumberland, Maryland, in an old Victorian house divided into six apartments. The landlord tries to keep the place up—fresh paint, hedges trimmed—to conform to the…
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I assign Martin Luther King Jr.’s ”Letter from Birmingham Jail” to the freshmen every term. It’s not an easy piece to read, and over the years I’ve come to know where they’ll get hung up. For example, they’ll press me…
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As for the holiday season upon us, I’m of the “Bah, Humbug” spirit of Christmas. The commercialism/sentimentalism that has taken Christmas over is irrelevant to the austerity and suffering of Christ’s life. Thanksgiving is more genuine. Apart from turkey, cranberry…
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At a recent Arts & Letters program at the Governor’s Mansion, Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly, suggested a possible counteroffensive against the rising power of the religious right. Peters believes that it is high time that we hear…
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I remember a visiting pastor coming to my church in rural Michigan when I was a kid. He was George Bernard, the man who wrote “The Old Rugged Cross,” by some statistical reckoning, the most-sung hymn ever written. That evening,…
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Christ preached against worldliness, in the sense that a life focused on external riches, power and status atrophies in its deeper essences. If we are thinking too much about the next possession or promotion, then we miss opportunities to grow…
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