as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District, January 5, 2020 Happy New Year! I was not supposed to be in the pulpit with you this morning. But plans change, people get sick, and I find myself with you today on the first Sunday of a new year and a new decade. It is good to be with you. It is good to be with even though the news at the opening of this, what...
as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, November 3, 2019 For about ten years I edited “Workers Power,” a monthly column that appeared in the labor newspaper the “Industrial Worker.” It was a forum for working people to share their experiences organizing a labor union. The people who wrote for it worked all kinds of jobs. Over the years I ran...
as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, October 6, 2019 I am a Yankee. Living in Houston has made this aspect of my identity abundantly clear. I move through the world in distinctively non-Texan ways. I do not wear cowboy boots. I cannot two-step. I do not own a car. I root for neither the Houston Texans nor the Dallas Cowboys–though we...
I have an op-ed in the September 20, 2019 Houston Chronicle. I wrote it in support of the global climate strike. Many members of the congregation I serve, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, will be participating.
I am really excited to be with you for another year of interim ministry. I am very much looking forward to what we have coming up! Most of our work together in the next months will revolve around three overlapping tasks. First, we will be preparing for the developmental ministry that will follow my interim ministry. This ministry will last between five and seven years. It will be designed with...
as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, August 25, 2019 When I was a kid, maybe in second grade, I was given a homework assignment. I was told to make a diorama of the water cycle. How many of you have had a similar assignment at some point in your schooling? It is a pretty familiar one. I proceeded with it as instructed. I got some blue paint. I...
as preached August 11, 2019 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus This morning’s sermon is a bit unusual. It does not have a single message or a unifying theme. Instead, it consists of my responses to questions from members of the congregation. Thirteen different people submitted questions and in the next twenty minutes or so I will attempt to respond to...
We spent an afternoon at about 20 minutes outside of the center of Angoulême. It has a long history. The family who built it first occupied the site in the late 10th century and have resided in it continuously since then. They claim to be one of the oldest families in France and the family archives certainly suggest that. The château is privately owned and operated. We arrived late in the...
We left Paris for a week in Sers, a small village outside of the southwestern city of Angoulême. We will staying with our friend Gilles Perrin and Nicole Ewenczyk. They just finished building a country house and studio there. It is so newly constructed that all of the furniture is yet to arrive. Everyone gets their own bedroom but I get to sleep on the floor. Here’s the list of my blog posts in...
Yesterday was one of the hottest days on record in Paris. It was officially 108 degrees Fahrenheit. I suspect that on the streets, with all the heat bouncing up from the cobblestones and concrete, it was a lot hotter. The heat was made worse by the fact that it was the third day in a row where temperatures had peaked at over 100 and not fallen below 80 or so at night. This meant that the inside...