Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year 4, NL)

People must have gasped when Jesus opened his mouth and said 'I am.'

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied a meal at a Virginia restaurant. I wonder who's welcome at our table.

Because my yearning comes from somewhere, and that somewhere must be you.

How is it that the poems of a 17th-century aristocrat still resonate with us?

In our Gospel text, some of Jesus’ disciples find his teaching hard. Eating his body? Drinking his blood? I didn’t sign up for this. Couldn’t I just pray for you?

I often think I hear colleagues asking, “How could we attract nuns to our church?” Actually they’re talking about “the nones,” of course. One of the clearest findings of the Pew Forum’s new religious landscape study is that fewer and fewer people have any religious affiliation at all. Catholics and mainline Protestants show the biggest drop. 

I feel pretty conflicted about all of this.

Social microhistories can capture big ideas. I’d like to write one on pickles, which are as fundamental to civilization as anything in Chesterton’s pockets.

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

The lectionary has focused our attention on bread for a very long time. One might think that five barley loaves transformed into a feast plus baskets full of leftovers would be news enough, but Jesus goes on to talk about the bread for another 36 verses. He would be a dream interview for today's 24-hour news shows, with their incessant need for commentary on the latest attention-grabbing headline.

Perhaps we should not be too hard on the people who ate their fill on the mountain and chased Jesus down on the other side.

Jesus offers signs of life in the midst of death.

Reconciliation requires relocation. To see the effects of our food choices, we have to get close to the land.