This week the hospital where I work started re-deploying many of its staff to help address changing needs during the current coronavirus outbreak. Instead of ministering to people in my usual physical therapy job, my new task is administering a thermometer, taking the temperature of each person who walks through
Spiritual Reflections
Managing Coronavirus Anxiety
If you have some anxiety about the coronavirus, here is a skill you might find useful. My psychotherapist taught me that anxiety starts with the emotion of fear in the body. For me, the fear usually showed up in my tense face and gut. Then my brain kicked in, producing
Every Day Is a Holy Day
Back in my college days, I got into an unexpectedly lively discussion with my then-fiancee about, of all things, whether we would tell our future children that there was a Santa Claus. Like most people, he was all for it. I had reservations. For one thing, I didn’t feel comfortable
Courageous Love in the Midst of Imperial Push and Pull
As I sat there in my thinking chair, pondering my recent study of Christian doctrine from the fall of Rome to the eve of the Renaissance, I asked myself: where does all this lead? Before I could think too long, my daughter Rosie brought me a live “cave” cricket she
Lessons from Behind the Walls
The words of Jesus from Matthew 25:36-40: “I was in prison and you came to visit me. … Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” I felt nervous entering Plainfield Correctional Facility in Plainfield, Indiana in October. I believed that prisons were not at all