Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Peripatetic Pastor

  • MAESTRO: How Bradley Cooper Gets Bernstein Wrong

    Movie Notes September 25, 2021. We were emerging from the COVID lockdowns. The Bellingham Symphony (BSO), a fine regional ensemble under the direction of Yaniv Attar, had been producing online concerts, but however fetchingly they are done online concerts are not the same as a live performance. Now, for the first time since the pandemic…

  • THE POPE’S BLESSING

    This week the front page of the e-edition of the New York Times prominently featured two religion stories, each in its own way about whether the church will fully accept LGBTQ people and same-sex marriage. The lead story was the pope’s decision to allow priests to bless same-sex unions (“Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex…

  • Anselm Kiefer and Hope: A Christmas Meditation

    To plunge into the art of Anselm Kiefer is to plunge into controversy. Is his art a profound meditation on the human condition or sophisticated kitsch? Is it monumental or bombastic? Is it liberating and brave or dour and depressing? (For a recent evaluation of Kiefer’s art, see Daniel A. Seidell, “Where Do You Stand?…

  • WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS AND WHAT THE BIBLE DOES

    Usually the question is what the Bible says. In my denomination, for example, we have carried on a long and often acrimonious debate about what the Bible says about women and a shorter but no less acrimonious debate about sexuality.  The standard procedure in my denomination for these kinds of questions is to appoint a…

  • FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING: THOUGHTS AT THANKSGIVING

    How should we remember the past? In this Thanksgiving season in the US, that question has considerable force. What is our relationship to what has shaped and formed us as a country?  What is the story that we will tell this Thanksgiving Day to our children and to ourselves? In my own case, the story might…

  • THE BIBLE AND MIKE JOHNSON

    Can the Bible survive its friends? That question occurred to me again after Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elevated to Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Asked about his approach to governing by Sean Hannity of Fox News, he said, “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious:…

  • ARE WE MAKING PROGRESS?

    Are we making progress? Are we making progress? I don’t have in mind technology here, although progress in technology makes an interesting test case for the assumptions we make about progress generally. Nor do I have in mind scientific knowledge. Even there the case is more complicated than one might think. But what of moral…

  • Barbie and Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights

    I’ve been away. Hence, the silence from this quarter. Among other things, while away, I had the opportunity to ponder again Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the marvelous Prado in Madrid. I was delighted to discover that it includes a Barbie house and predation in the Garden of Eden, both of which I’ve…

  • BREATH

    I have been meaning to write this piece for some time, but other topics keep coming in the way. And cultural events like the Barbenheimer movies, movies which frame a mood in America, a taking stock of the ebbing era of American power. In their own way, both Barbie and Oppenheimer deal with the loss of innocence, happily so…

  • THE PERVERSITY OF PERFECTION

    The Nicodemus Problem The church has a Nicodemus problem. Perhaps you remember the fraught dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3:1-21. Nicodemus, introduced in the story as a Pharisee and one of the “rulers of the Jews,” politely approaches Jesus as a miracle worker, presumably leading up to some theological question or challenge, but…