Benjamin J. Dueholm

Battery Park's carnival atmosphere was just what my family was looking for. We needed to be somewhere with fresh, crass air—far from our parsonage home.

A few friendly pointers

My grandmother died in 2005, on the eve of the feast of Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany. The next day I went to the weekday eucharist at St. James Cathedral in Chicago, and the story of Martha and her sister brought me instantly to tears. Like so many women of her generation (and not only hers), my grandmother was deeply identified with her hospitality and service. She was a lot like Martha, and I loved her for it. I am more troubled now than I was then at the way this story is gendered in our reading.

Amos 7:7-17

Pulling the beam from one’s eye is not an afternoon's task. It takes a whole life of faith—and Alan Chambers's faithful words offer an honest example.

In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence. I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention.

When my senior colleague proposed a ten-week sermon series on the saints, I was hesitant. Would anyone find this interesting?

The NFL gambled on fans’ willingness to endure the replacement refs. It was wrong—a good development for whatever ethical margin a football fan might claim.

A sociologist might see in football a society's need to control and ritualize violence. The church fathers, however, weren't much for sociologists.

There's a danger in making veterans into secular saints. The saints don’t need us to give their deaths meaning; they died fully rewarded.

On Sunday night I went to hear Dan Savage speak about the It Gets Better Project. The last time I saw him was 2003, if memory serves, in front of a crowd of perhaps a hundred. At one point Savage took a break from promoting his new book Skipping Toward Gomorrah to refer his audience to the now-famous New Republic cover story "The Liberal Case for War" (against Iraq). It was a good talk, funny and engaging, and it made a striking contrast with his Sunday appearance.

Redistributing wealth is what all public budgets do. The question is whether a given type of redistribution promotes justice and decency.

Michele Bachmann's frontrunner moment may be past. But she has shown how the Republicans can win in the restless small towns of the swing-state Midwest.

I recently encountered a praying mantis perched on top of a structural pillar at a playground. Naturally, I thought of St. Simeon Stylites.

For better or for worse, the sex columnist provides real-time exegesis of the seventh commandment.