Category Essay
My Back Pages: Iftar with the DuPage Republicans
(A version of this appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi, in September 2009. It is not longer extant and their site, so I have posted it here). In the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, enthusiasm for interfaith iftar events swept America’s liberal Christians. When I was studying theology, an interfaith iftar – […]
Chicago Diarist: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
(I wrote this in January, 2007) My literary production, such as it is (and as far as I may use the term without self-mockery), is highly dependent on the CTA. Back when I still tried to write poetry, a conversation about a dead man overheard on a bus furnished the matter of one of the […]
Preaching Notebook: Flesh and Blood
I was stunned and saddened to see this post from Freddie deBoer on Sunday: My day-to-day existence has become entirely unmanageable, and I fear for my health and safety. I do not have much of a plan at this point other than to get checked in. When I am back out I will try to […]
Wisconsin Diarist: Good Night, Ann B., Wherever You Are
(I wrote this in September, 2010) The siding industry should be alerted to the existence of Hudson, Wisconsin. I had occasion to pass through my old hometown last weekend, and I was struck by how little my neighborhood had changed, architecturally, since we moved away in 1990. It is a river town, your last stop […]
My Back Pages: The Guy Who Came Into the Cold
(I wrote this for The National in Abu Dhabi in February, 2009. It is no longer extant on their site, so I am posting it here) Just over a hundred years ago my father’s family settled in the town of Luck in northern Wisconsin. Winter descends there in October or November and lingers until April […]
Chicago Diarist: Nowhere to Lay His Head
(I wrote this in June 2010) The storms on Wednesday night were very intense out here. We lost power before 6 p.m. After the cell passed, we called ComEd for an estimate of its return. The hour came and went, and so we went to a hotel. A baby girl in our care needed a […]
California Diarist: Fruit of the Earth and Work of Human Hands
(I wrote this in September, 2010) It had been eleven years since I’d last seen Tom. At the end of a premature and ill-advised visit to Deep Springs not three months after I had graduated, I sat out where the college’s access road meets the state highway that splits the valley. It was early, perhaps […]
Chicago Diarist: Thought for the Morrow
(I wrote this in February, 2011, when I was serving as a part-time associate pastor in a small Chicago parish and it seemed that I was not going to receive a full-time call anywhere) “Be careful what you wish for” is advice that I long ago learned to heed in my preaching life. I don’t […]
New York Diarist: Into Your Hands
(I wrote this in December, 2010) Four long years had passed since I last visited New York, and it seemed at times as though my once-frequent trips out there had become a thing of the past. But a friend of long duration, with whom I had walked and talked through the interminable ELCA ordination process, […]
Chicago Diarist: Home
(I wrote this in July, 2008, shortly after my internship at Bethel-Imani Lutheran church ended) Early last year, after buying yet another friend a copy of Gilead to see him on his journey away from Chicago, I read the opening on the train. I made myself stop after this: I don’t know how many times people have […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 