Amid all the Leap Year hoopla today, there’s this from Fiona Keating in today’s International Business Times — “In order to gain the trust of the indigenous people of Jamaica, Christopher Columbus used the lunar eclipse on February 29, 1504, to trick them. “The local chiefs had stopped helping his crew with the food and…

We can do better. “The Thursday evening cage match” is how Randall W. Forsyth characterized the Republican presidential candidates’ debate. In yesterday’s edition of Barron’s, The Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly, his lead editorial pointed to “the priceless screenshot of front-runner Donald Trump flanked by Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz with the closed caption:…

  Several have asked what I read for inspiration and formation. Hearing those as serious questions and happy to let you in on some of what’s been shaping me recently. Jane Marie Thibault writes on page 29 of the devotional book Disciplines 2016 — Dear God, I am often tempted to envy the spiritual gifts…

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world,” said E. B. White, “and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Beneath the humor in those lines is an awkward truth. So…what are you planning on doing — improving or enjoying?

It’s on lotsa Grandma’s refrigerators. Many of us have at least part of it memorized. Some groups close their meetings with it. The first part is in our current hymnal. Brilliant Lutheran pastor and theologian Reinhold Neibuhr is credited with writing it as part of the pastoral prayer in a regular worship service in 1926.…

WEATHER DECISION Our church staff was been in contact with each other this morning, thanks to the wonders of group texting. Given the storm and common sense, we’ve closed the church office for today and cancelled everything on our local church schedule for today. Not a quick decision at all, especially if you know the…

“I thought religion was the opiate of the masses,” said the Secretary of State to her teenage son, referencing a quote he liked to use against his parents and their beliefs. They were in the hospital chapel where her husband, who’s also his father and a professor of theology, was a patient. “It is,” he…

New every morning is your love, great God of light, By and all day long you are working for good in the world. Stir up in us desire to serve you. — Prayer of Thanksgiving, 877, The United Methodist Hymnal, current edition It’s there. May God indeed stir up in us that desire that’s already within us.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” says Jesus. Do we take him up on that offer? Or do we just keep on zooming along, and ignore his generous offer of a Real Rest Area in our lives? Pretty good deal here in Matthew 11:28: Come to…

New every morning is your love, great God of light, and all day long you are working for good in the world. — Prayer of Thanksgiving, 877, The United Methodist Hymnal, current edition By the grace of God, may we be part of what God’s doing for good in the world today. AND LOOKING AHEAD — And?…