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 […]

Goodly Heritage

Two recent articles in the Christian Century magazine have set me to thinking about the mystery of how any of us comes to be who we are. Brian Doyle’s Two Uncles made me think about my own unique and occasionally peculiar uncles. They sat at family gatherings “silent as mountains” Doyle writes which reminded me of […]

Every Human Life

It is easy to forget what it was like in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center falling on September 11, 2001. Americans were afraid. The church I was serving at the time sits directly across the street from the 100 story John Hancock Building, […]

Grandaddy Eggs

One of my fondest memories is of my father, on a day off from the Pennsylvania Railroad, making vegetable soup. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was doing at the time but I loved the aroma in the kitchen. As I came through the back door from school or from delivering newspapers on […]

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 […]

A Baseball Roadtrip

I do not have a bucket list but if I had one what I did last weekend would be near the top.For years my three sons and I have talked about a baseball road trip. Each of them played baseball, Little League and High School. I helped coach each in Little League. One of them […]

On Change and Transition

When I arrived at Fourth Presbyterian Church in the summer of 1985 many in the congregation could not envision a future without Elam Davies. There was great skepticism about the new minister who would no doubt start to change things, maybe even beloved traditions and practices and who, simply, was not Elam Davies. Transitions, especially […]

Reading Fiction and the Lessons of History

Sometimes it seems that reading a novel is an unnecessary luxury, a frivolous waste of time. The antidote to that questionable conclusion is a good novel you can’t put down, continue reading late into the night, even find yourself structuring your day so that you can get back to reading. It happened to me recently […]

Doing God’s Work

For several years I met with a group of Christian and Jewish leaders to discuss how Christians and Jews can talk together about the Middle East. The underlying concern of the Jewish participants was why Mainline Protestant Churches seem, to the Jewish community, to be so unbalanced in their attitudes about Israel. Christian participants wondered […]