Spiritual Geography 
May 31, 2013 by
The first morning I woke up in the Berkshires, in September 1998, my new boss took me on a drive. When we emerged from the woods on the brow of a hill, I literally gasped – at the spread of the mountains, the shades of green, the little houses and barns spread out before us. I […]
Fun With HDR
May 28, 2013 by
Some photos I took, playing around with the HDR iPhoto app, TrueHDR, which takes three exposures of a scene, and combines them into one — each level with the best possible lighting and color. In an ordinary shot, you have to choose one level at the primary focus. So, you end up with some crazy […]
You Know You’re A Suburbanite When…
May 27, 2013 by
You’re on a bike ride and as you approach your driveway, you reach for the garage door opener that, surely, is clipped to the rim of your helmet…? You know there are NO shortcuts through subdivisions. You never worry that you won’t find a parking place. Your most common pastime seems to be buying more […]
Two Blocks on the West Side 
May 12, 2013 by
Last week, I went to a chaplain graduation with one of my parishioners (congrats, Cindy!). The program was at Bishop Anderson House, in the Illinois Medical District, so the ceremony was nearby at one of our West Side Episcopal churches, St. Andrew’s, a historically Black church. For some, it’s downtown Chicago that fills them with pride and love […]
My Conversation with “Jacob”
May 6, 2013 by
Why Congregations Shouldn’t Work So Hard to Keep Their Young People This is an article I wrote for the Collegeville Institute about “Jacob,” a Jewish kid who composes music on an old Game Boy and plans to stop being “religious” when he goes to college, and impressed me in a conversation we had last week. […]
Spring Bike Ride at Argonne
April 27, 2013 by
Growing up I rode bikes around my city neighborhood and the lakefront with my dad and my brother, but sometime in high school I got this (hopefully false!) sense of premonition that I would get some kind of spinal injury from riding a bike. So I stayed away from them for years. Now, living out […]
Lonely Men
April 23, 2013 by
There’s been a mallard around the pond at our park the past few weeks. He’s all alone – he stands on the grass or sits on the water, solo. No other ducks in sight. I don’t know much about the social habits of ducks but when I see that mallard, I’m reminded of a loneliness […]
The Disappeared Houses
April 15, 2013 by
On a walk last month, Adam and I noticed a memorial plaque under a tree… for a street address. Curious. (If you want to go find it, it’s along Lily Cache Greenway between Orchard and Plainview.) When we got home I searched for “109 Arcadia Court” on Google Maps and a little red tag popped […]
