Non-Houstonians have such strange ideas about the City of Houston, if they have any ideas at all. Usually it is a surprise for them to find that Houston is the country’s fourth largest city, behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. By the end of this decade, it is expected to pass Chicago. Houston had [...]

Albert Mohler is the president of a southern baptist seminary and has a blog that I read regularly, even though I quite often disagree with him and always in the broad area of ’sexuality’–abortion, stem cell research, cloning, family, etc, However, he writes in such a well-reasoned way that he causes me to sharpen my [...]

I want to express my sorrow on the death of your husband. In listening to the spoken tributes at the Library, something happened to me that I want to share with you. For the first time I began to see your husband without the filter of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. That incident had [...]

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, 1878-1965, left Nazi Germany in 1938. Out of his experience, he came up with the word ‘eliminationism.’ At its heart eliminationism is the idea that by eliminating a person or group, those who are left can have a sane, secure and successful society. Eliminate the vile Jews and German society [...]

Christians have been involved in health care for centuries. In the United States this often took the form of building hospitals. In the Houston Medical Center, touted as the largest in the world, there is Methodist Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal and the Baylor College of Medicine (Baptist Medical School). Several Baptist hospitals are spotted around [...]

Having been ordained in the Congregational church, the church of the Pilgrims and Puritans, their history became my history. This means I had to embrace their absurdities as well as their magnificent accomplishments. They get blamed for far more than they deserve, and I often find myself defending them from their detractors. One incident that [...]

A church in the Kansas City area is having a ‘Blessing of the Backpacks.’ At first, the idea startled me, but then I thought of other blessing ceremonies surrounding human activities. Certainly there are the traditional blessings of birth (baptism), coming of age (confirmation), marriage and death. Then there is the annual blessing of the [...]

One day I am reading that the United Church of Christ is losing churches at the rate of three each week (die or leave) and gaining churches at the rate of 0.7 each week (brand new or joining from other denominations) for a weekly loss of 2.3 churches (the UCC currently has 5,320 churches and [...]

Mark Twain considered it his most important book, and his best book. It was fourteen years in the making, twelve years of research and two years of writing. The book is Joan of Arc, a book of which I had never heard.
Having only a sketchy acquaintance of Joan of Arc, I decided to read the [...]

Speaking of a war between science and religion is quite common. I find that ‘war’ metaphor quite objectionable. A far better metaphor, to my mind, is to consider these two areas of human existence as ‘siblings.’ For although science and religion can be at odds with each other (what brothers and sisters don’t fight), they [...]