Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope is out and available from the publisher and all the usual places where you buy words on pages (and words in pixels and spoken, the Kindle and audio versions are available too!). The description from the publisher: Bible […]

Order Beautiful and Terrible Things

I often find myself copying/pasting from PDFs into Word, Notes, OneNote, etc. Unfortunately, every line of the PDF is treated as a single line with a line break after it. The result is a LOT of time spent going back and deleting the line break (carriage return) in order to […]

How to fix line breaks when pasting in iPadOS (and …

Today’s your birthday. Just one day.Just one day. That’s all it is. Just one day.? That’s all it took. Just one day.  To take you from us. Just one day.?And a lifetime is gone. In just one day.? Today, 16 January 2025, is Mack’s 21st birthday. Or would be, if […]

Mack’s Birthday

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Sermon for Christmas, Proper I, 2024. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness–on them light has shined.” Happy Christmas! What a warm and wonderful time and place to be together. The opening of our service in darkness […]

Christmas – The Light

Reflections for my sermon on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2024. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.?Amen. The Gospels tell us surprisingly little about Mary. (And in point of […]

Advent 4 – Mary, the Model of Faith

Reflections for my sermon on the Third Sunday of Advent, 2024. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.” When I was growing up, this time of year was the best time of the year. We were […]

Advent 3 – How can we rejoice?

My reflection and substance of the sermon preached for the Second Sunday of Advent 2024. When I was an undergrad, Cornell had very few courses on the New Testament, but I took all that I could find. Several were taught within the English department by Professor Bishop. He was an […]

Advent 2 – Remember(ed)

Judgment

Reflections for my sermon on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024. “There will be signs,” Jesus said. All around us there are signs, indications that the season has fully changed. The leaves have turned and fallen, the weather is very cold, and here in our sanctuary, in the church the […]

Advent 1 – “There Will Be Signs”

This year’s Society of Biblical Literature meeting was special for me as I completed my second (and final) three-year term as a member of Council. The last six years have been eventful, to say the least. In that time there have been debates (and complaints) about having to print our […]

Grateful to Serve the SBL

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This is an entry in the “Acrostic Contemplations.”? Knowledge is a flexible term. In some languages, like German, you can have several different words which all track to a single, meager, “to know” in English. You might know a person at work, you can know a fact about the world, […]

K is for “Knowledge”

Here is a tip I could not find it anywhere on the interwebs. My Apple Pencil (which I use extensively to highlight PDFs while reading in Endnote and other apps) stopped working. The iPad could see it, knew it was there, fully charged, but when I went to write, highlight, […]

Apple Pencil not working? Screw it.