I’m a big fan of Jim Gaffigan and a faithful viewer of The Jim Gaffigan Show. The show is in its second season on TV LAND during a time slot that is unbeknownst to this avid DVR aficionado. I think it airs sometime on Sundays following reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond while preceding reruns of […]
[I wrote this poem a couple years ago…rediscovered it today. I still really like it.] Carried by Doug Bursch Today I’ve been feeling sad, heart heavy, soul weary. I presume I could find a reason for the feelings, but it seems to me that the feeling arrived before I could ascribe to it cause. Some […]
A systematically unjust world will produce perpetually angry people. Anger flows from a lack of control, power and value. When we are powerless, devalued and controlled by societal injustices, anger is the appropriate response. In fact, it would be wrong to tell systematically sinned against people to relinquish their anger. Anger is a natural, logical […]
I believe music was created so I’d be able to find my heart no matter how cruel and cold the world becomes. A few weeks ago, while watching the musical Hamilton rightfully steamroll the Tony awards, I happened upon a non-Hamilton related song, voice and performance that was nothing short of a revelation. I’m going […]
Early on in my pastoral ministry, I went to a regular pastors’ gathering where we prayed for each other. After a couple of meetings, I realized the pastors didn’t really share any serious problems. It kind of annoyed me. One week, I shared that my wife and I needed prayer because we had been fighting […]
I must admit I was rather giddy to see the opening night of Jon Marans’ new book adaptation of Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon at the 5th Avenue Theatre last night. Reading the production notes about Marans’ collaborative working process with director David Armstrong, music supervisor Ian Eisendrath and choreographer Josh Rhodes only added […]
This is the second part of a conversation Tim Fall and I are having about social media. We asked each other some important questions about social media and responded without looking at each other’s answers. We found that we have a bit in common. Anyway, You can read the first post at Tim’s blog by […]
Just a quick heads up today. My friend, Tim Fall, who blogs at Just One Train Wreck After Another and I decided to team up to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of social media. So we got together for a two part mini-series (think The Thorn Birds) that talks about our […]
A.J. Swoboda’s latest book, The Dusty Ones, has a title evocative of a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western. However, the actual content of The Dusty Ones deals with a different kind of grit, namely the interrelationship between wandering and spiritual maturity. For anyone caught somewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land it is a worthy read. […]
For 5 years I produced and hosted a daily Christian radio talk show in Seattle, Washington. During my 1,200 plus shows, I tried hard to treat people the way I would want to be treated or at least to speak about them as if they were real people, not just conversation fodder. To ensure that […]