Healing Words for Harried Times
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What song shall that be? This Sunday I am hitting up Psalm 149, the penultimate and most musical psalm in the psalter. Sing to the Lord a new song. And what song shall that be for you, for me? Let me tell you about a MOST musical religious experience I had on sabbatical. You’re supposed to have religious […]
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church… And I will give you the keys to the kingdom”. Matthew 16 As a little Roman Catholic kid, this very familiar verse is one of the only Bible stories I can remember being told. After all this was the […]
I am proud of my heritage and was very fond of telling visitors on my tours at the Library of Congress, that I am a multigenerational Washingtonian. As in D.C. While others move in and out of the city, with each passing administration, the Peacocks have stayed there from one decade to the next. I […]
Today Monday, August 3 2026, I read Librarians and Booksellers Will Be Arrested for Doing Their Jobs in Arkansas. Terrifying. So, I am reposting this from February of last year. Fahrenheit 2025 | The Year It All Burned Down Ray Bradbury’s classic begins: “It was a PLEASURE TO BURN. “It was a special pleasure to seen […]
I am no Hemingway… But like the Old Man of his Pulitzer winning novel, I have long had a problematic relationship with large bodies of water. Sea water and pool water. As a child – by the sea, by the beautiful sea – my fair, freckled skin would fry to a crisp. Bright red and […]
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(Midterms are coming! Get out the vote!) I am itching to do an exorcism. Not very Episcopal, you say. True, so true. But the truth of the matter is that exorcism remains an Anglican tradition. More polite, well mannered, and tasteful compared to our Roman Catholic cousins. More prayerful, more reverent, more pastoral than the Hollywood […]
(from the archives) Henna does not hurt. Partying like it was 1999 – which it was – I spent a little sliver of my sabbatical at Venice Beach. I stayed with my new age, hipster, therapist friend Carey. We went rollerblading. We got our hair braided into a thousand little braids. We got our picture […]
I do not cook – so – I pretty much live on a steady diet of comfort food. Comfort food that someone else has made. That someone else being Trader Joe’s or Washington Perk Market just down the street. A comfort food diet, of course, is not to be recommended in any way for any reason. […]
I remember my older sister reading me to sleep. P.D. Eastman’s, Are You My Mother? was one of my favorites. But what really rocked me to sleep were Dr. Seuss’s rhythmic cadences of The Cat in the Hat. I never made it to kindergarten. I was no wunderkind reading at three. But I remember coming home from my […]
