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What Works: Waiting Patiently Follow-up and Martha and Mary
My last column, about waiting patiently for a late bus, provoked some interesting comments and reactions (on the site and directly) that tease out the bigger issues involved. While I wrote about...
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What Works: Cultivating presence
I often hear people talking about living in the present moment as if it is a struggle, some cosmic game of attempting to grasp something that is fleeting, illusory. They say things like, "the moment I...
View ArticleWhat Works: Lessons from Steve Jobs
I probably should have had an obit for Steve Jobs ready to run. We had a dry run when he resigned as head of Apple a few months ago. But I didn’t, and many others have accurately chronicled the facts,...
View ArticleThe Way: A Pilgrimage Worth Taking
The Way, written and directed by Emilio Estevez (Bobby) and starring his father, Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now, The West Wing, The Departed), is rather obviously about the spiritual journey. The Camino...
View ArticleWhat Works: SAD That DST is Ending
Every year, at the beginning of warm weather, I encourage everyone to get out in the sun and experience nature, but it’s important to respect the rhythms of nature and our body in cold weather too....
View ArticleWhat Works: Between acceptance and thirst
We are told it is natural to thirst for fulfillment in aligning our life with God’s plan for us and to thirst for the kingdom of heaven on earth to be made manifest around us. So how is this compatible...
View ArticleWhat Works: The Gratitude List
This is the last column to run before Thanksgiving, so I want to talk to you about gratitude. I could write a dozen columns about gratitude in various forms; for this column, I'm going to focus on one...
View ArticleWhat Works: Conscious Gift Shopping
Many "alternative" gift articles suggest non-gifts -- things like giving to charity in the person's name, or giving service rather than a thing -- but choosing a present specifically for another...
View ArticleForming A More Perfect Union
My relatives are an eclectic bunch, pretty evenly split -- to use crude and somewhat useless political labels -- between Left and Right; our religious diversity includes Catholics, Mormons,...
View ArticleFaithful Departed: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was never a corporate man. The early personal computer industry was an outgrowth of the radical back-to-the-land ethos and even the name “Apple” was intentionally folksy and home-brewed. For...
View ArticleFaithful Departed: Improper Women — Betty Ford (1918 – 2011) and Amy...
For most of the public history of alcoholism and drug addiction all the way back to Noah, the general impression has been that it is something that happens to men. Women might have gotten “in trouble”...
View ArticleWhat Works: SOPA, PIPA and the Illusion of Control
It was all of 13 minutes after midnight on Tuesday night when I went to look up something in Wikipedia… even though I knew the blackout protest was coming and had posted about it. If you didn’t know...
View ArticleWhat Works: What Are You Giving Up for Lent?
"What are you giving up for Lent?" is not a question I heard growing up in my atheist home. It’s second nature for most Catholics, though -- to give up some favorite thing (like chocolate or ice cream)...
View ArticleWhat Works: Being imperfect doesn’t mean you’re bad, just human
I broke my Lenten commitment on day one. On Ash Wednesday, after a difficult day, I trudged right past two people asking for change on my way home, remembering my commitment but in my aggravation...
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What Works: Starting Anew
It seems that every year around this time I'm inspired to write about renewal and fresh starts. That's not surprising, of course. The vernal equinox (March 20) is just days away and where I live in the...
View ArticleWhat Works: The Hunger Games — Is Its Violence Appropriate?
I wasn’t going to write about The Hunger Games movie – I’m a huge fan of the books and had no advance screening, so I just went to the theater with everyone else on opening night as a consumer. But I...
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One Ha’ Penny, Two Ha’ Penny, Hot Cross Buns
Every year, I bring hot cross buns to an Easter brunch gathering of family and friends. Sharing food has always been sacred to me, all the more so when it's around a spiritual event. I don't know why I...
View ArticleWhat Works: Waiting patiently
One of the most popular columns I’ve ever written is about struggling with being on time. It led to a TV interview and over two years later people still regularly bring it up in conversation. But...
View ArticleThe Integrity of Creation
One of the first and key places I encountered the spiritual ideas that eventually led to my baptism was Estes Park, high in the Rockies, amidst Birkenstock-wearing radical environmentalists. It was an...
View ArticleWhat Works: Building Up Others
In preparing to give a presentation on the structures of faith communities, I was just reading 1 Corinthians 12-14. You may, like me, be familiar with chapters 12 and 13 separately as two of the...
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