From Where I Stand  April 8, 2021 NCR

Sunday, March 28, was Passion Sunday — Palm Sunday we call it now, in this era. Whatever generation you are, however you name it, this Sunday marks the opening of Holy Week. It is a liturgical narrative of the acme of the life of Jesus and his journey from the Galilee to the cross.

From Where I Stand  March 17, 2021  NCR

This is going to be a COVID-19 kind of Lent, and that may be one of the best things that ever happens to our spiritual lives. 

COVID-19 landed in the middle of our very busy selves and turned them upside down. The question is, is it all bad? The fact is that COVID-19 managed to do for us what we have not been able to do ourselves. For maybe years now.

Here's the box score.

From Where I Stand February 11, 2021  NCR

Amazing, isn't it, how quickly life changes, becomes good again, gets resolved? Goes back to "normal." Maybe. At least we seem to think so.

From Where I Stand  January 21, 2021  NCR

It is two weeks since the attack on the Capitol of this democratic republic by a single-minded but diverse group of Trumpists — dissenters, white supremacists, thugs, the delusional and Republicans. That energy, it appears, arises from a kind of cult following of past-President Donald Trump. It certainly does not come out of either a love for the Constitution or a love for a country already struggling to find its way through a society and a globe in transition.

From Where I Stand   December 31, 2020  NCR

The president-elect is proceeding to envision a future of political history not unlike the ones before this one and getting barely a bit of federal help to do it.

The population at large is still pretending that the pandemic is an irritation, not a danger, and while the numbers of COVID-19 cases continue to spiral upward, the "invincibles" of our society go on traveling the country and planning Christmas parties.

From Where I Stand  12/10/2020  NCR

The world runs on two dimensions: first, on facts — and not facts. And second, on wisdom. Facts — and not facts — we have in abundance. Wisdom, not so much.

From Where I Stand  11/19/2020  NCR

Why is it that some things we never forget and other things we never remember? I work with those ideas a lot.

But one answer I know without flaw: I had a mother who assiduously insisted that there was something to be learned in everything. I'd pour out my losses or celebrate my gains and my mother — somewhere along the way — managed to make her ever-living point: "And what did you learn from that, Joan?" she asked. Over and over again. Always. 

From Where I Stand 11/3/2020  NCR

As this era's debacle of a democracy comes groaningly to an end, I find myself feeling less and less satisfied. Relieved that it's almost over, yes. Satisfied, no. The fact is that we have not come to an end; we have come to an even more important beginning: We have questions to ask ourselves, questions to answer for the future. And one thing of which I am certain: The time for it is now. We do not dare wait until we cannot get out of what we allowed to develop in the first place.

From Where I Stand  October 8, 2020 NCR

There is a very poignant moment in Scripture that gets little exegesis, it seems, but it touches the deepest nerve of a people in mourning for the loss of the character of their nation. Like our own.

It is the picture in Luke 19 of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem — the city on the hill that was the heart and soul of the nation.

From Where I Stand  9/17/2020 NCR

They call it a "pandemic," meaning occurring all over the world, all around the globe. Horrible. Overwhelming. Heart-stopping.

The world has gone into lockdown, been felled — so many ravaged, so many sick, so many out of work, so much of the world looking straight into the abyss of economic collapse as a result. And all of that thanks to invisible particles from a random virus.

Except, not exactly.