Bill Teague’s lpc e-pistle

E-pistle is early this week and not written from Langhorne.  I am sitting in the Miami Airport during a scheduled nearly seven hour layover between my flight from Philadelphia and tonight’s overnight to Belo Horizonte, Brazil.  I should be on the ground in Belo Horizonte around 8:30 local time, just an hour earlier than Eastern time. I will be arriving in late winter Brazil with daytime temperatures in the mid-seventies, cool nights and low humidity. Continue Reading »

This coming Thursday and Friday, Elder Doug Jenkins and I will be in Minneapolis for something called the Gathering of the Fellowship of Presbyterians. The Fellowship is a barely organized organization.  As the story is told, a small group of large church Presbyterian pastors gathered early this year to discuss ways that our PCUSA denomination might find new ways to be a community of like-minded, Christ-centered congregations, supporting and encouraging one another in the training and discipline of our leaders and in that kind of mission that we best do together, in other words, a new way of doing the old things that mark us as being Presbyterian. They said they saw a denomination that is deathly ill and that they were tired of watching it die a slow death. Continue Reading »

The lead article in last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review section has generated conversations and comments that have continued far longer than the usual Monday morning chatter of those who pay attention to such things.  “What Happened to Obama?” is worth reading. If you don’t like politics, it’s still worth reading. If you are a partisan of the President and don’t like to hear him being dissed, it’s still worth reading. If you root for the Republicans and don’t like to see them being trashed, it’s still worth reading.

Drew Weston is a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, a political liberal and an ardent supporter of President Obama during the 2008 campaign. His Times article begins in Washington on Inauguration Day. Weston has brought his eight-year old daughter to the capital to witness the historic event. But the father and professor senses that something is wrong. The man whose story and whose ability to tell a story had captured the nation the previous fall seems not to have a story to tell that blustery January day. The speech is flat and uninspiring. Continue Reading »

For the sake of full disclosure, I should acknowledge my own practice of public prayer. I have prayed at the launching of a ship and the dedication of a pulp mill; at the opening of a county board of supervisors meeting and for the Elks and the Rotary clubs.  I have prayed for the lighting of a Christmas tree in the town square and at a wedding reception where the guests shouted “Let’s get drunk!” rather than “Amen!”  when I had finished. Continue Reading »