Seamus Heaney was a poet born in Northern Ireland. In 1992, he delivered the S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture at Goshen College. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He died last week. I may have met him. In 1992 I worked at Goshen College, just down the hall from the English Department. If […]

((First published in a different form on May 28, 2008) How was your trip?” That’s what everyone wants to know. It would take more than 4 days to write all the details of touch and taste and sound and sight, of voices and glances and expressions from our trip of the last four days. And […]

(First published October 19, 2011) You are waiting. You aren’t sure what’s happening. You can’t see to the end of today. And you are waiting. It reminds you of that summer before your senior year of high school, the summer that you worked third shift. All alone in the building, all alone working on the […]

(First published July 26, 2012) When I was much younger, I memorized Romans 12 one summer, for some prize. I haven’t forgotten the first paragraph or two, about being a living sacrifice, about renewing my mind. I remember how J.B. Phillips paraphrased the second verse: “Don’t let the world  around you squeeze you into its own mold.” […]