Across the Divide

Our minister, Shannon Kershner, read Matthew 5: 13-16 to us Sunday morning, told us we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world and challenged us to start acting like it. Shannon said that a clergy friend of hers was invited to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last week so […]

Hold to the Good

Recently I was invited to address a monthly meeting of a group of adults at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago where I served as pastor for 26 years. The invitation included the suggestion that the topic might be “Hold to the Good”, a phrase from the Charge to the Congregation that I used every […]

If the Answer is “Yes.”

I have resisted the temptation to weigh in more than I already have on the Donald Trump phenomenon because we are saturated. Television news and the newspapers can’t keep their eyes off of him and I confess that I watch the 7:00 a.m. news because I don’t want to miss the latest outlandish thing he […]

A Scottish Love Affair

I began a private, very personal love affair with Scotland decades ago when I first learned that Buchanan is a Scottish clan name with its own colorful tartan and coat of arms and that our Presbyterian church came from Scotland. The more I learned about Scotland, Scottish history, Highland culture, the Scottish Reformation, the more […]

A Grateful Man

I knew it was coming some day but never imagined that it might actually happen. As of January 1, 2016, I am fully retired. For the first time since September 1960, I am no longer employed as a minister and no longer responsible for the life of an institution. I worked as a Presbyterian minister […]

To Love Your Neighbor

I have always thought that the conventional maxim – “religion and politics do not and should not mix” was not only wrong but misleading and downright silly. Of course they mix. We express our deepest values which often are rooted in our religious beliefs in how we live, how we order our priorities and spend […]

One Wild and Precious Life

John Buchanan presented the following lecture at Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina, in January 2015.  People are curious about clergy. Even people who are not particularly church-oriented regard ministers and priests as curiosities. They think we are somehow fundamentally different from everybody else; that we are untouched by the normal matters of life that […]

The Bread of Life

Living life as a Christian is, at least in part, a matter of practices, doing Christian things, developing habits of faith: praying, worshipping, singing, sharing, giving. Augustine wrote about cultivating the habit of Christian virtue in terms of four specific forms of love. When scholars take up the topic they are inclined to use the […]

Confirmation and the Body of Christ

I am certainly not the first to observe the great difference between parenting and grandparenting, that from the vantage point of the years we understand that what we thought were near crises were not so serious after all, that whether or not they ate their brussels sprouts had nothing to do with the kind of […]

Thoughts and a Prayer for Fathers’ Day

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine Within your house; Your children will be like olive shoots around your table…… May you see your children’s children. Psalm 128 I’m thinking about my father. He died too soon, when he was 59, of emphysema, from smoking several packs of Camels a day all his life […]