I have a cherished colleague. Her name is Dr. M. Cathy Harmon-Christian. She teaches in the theology department at Marist. Among other things, she and I have a chavruta, a study-based friendship. It’s a lot of fun. An offshoot of that chavruta is that every so often she’ll send along a question asked by her students. “What’s […]
Daily Life
Predictions for 5778
Here are some predictions for 5778. I’m pretty confident they’ll come to pass. 5778 will be a year of… radical love and radical hatred profound peace and profound violence deep connection and deep alienation wisdom and folly clarity and ambiguity health and sickness laughter and tears life and death progress and decline momentum and […]
Knowing and Unknowing
So this is an actual conversation that took place with a bunch of 5th graders this week in the context of a class I teach called Menschology… What if each of us actually knew a lot more about a lot of really important things than we actually give ourselves credit for. What if each of […]
empty-handed
This week’s Torah portion, Re’eh, ends with the idea that no one should come to God empty-handed (Deut. 16:16). As I heard these words chanted from the Torah this morning, I found myself wondering whether it’s actually possible to show up empty-handed. To me, empty-handed implies that we’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing. To bring. To […]
Death (Day 3)
Everyone else in the hotel has their plans for the day and we have ours. People look at you a little funny and with a tinge of pity when they see you dressed in funerary garb. The limo arrives at the house. We check to see if it has lathes for car seats. We head […]
Death (Day 2)
All of a sudden it’s a new day. I guess it’s obvious but you only have one date of death. Quickly time starts to accumulate. Today my daughter got a napkin and wiped tears from my wife’s eyes. Then she sat in my father in law’s oversized arm chair and said it felt like he […]