Dear Friends Let me show you some snap shots of my summer, beginning with the wonderful week Lory and I spent at Chris and Harvey Place’s condo in Mammoth Lake, California.

Dear Friends, Since I donated my time to the Unitarian Fellowship at Chautauqua I feel like I was a minister-on-loan for a week. I was an emissary from Westport, preaching at their Sunday service and offering a series of five lectures, from Monday to Friday.

Dear Friends, I’ve walked a two-mile loop along Compo beach almost every day this year—the routine has become a discipline.  It serves me well, not only for the exercise, but the contemplation time.

Dear Friends, Last summer I gave a lecture in the Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institute as part of a series on ethics.  The talk, which I called, Humor as a Moral Imperative, suggested that a well-developed sense of humor is a serious ethical responsibility.

Dear Friends, Bob Perry, our Youth Advisor for the past eleven years, has made a tremendous contribution to the high school youth group.  During those years a lot has happened in his life—he and Candice were married, he completed graduate education to prepare to teach, he got a job at Eagle Hill School where he’s […]

Dear Friends, At our staff meeting last week we mapped out the year—we call it calendarizing.

Dear Friends, Benedict XVI is our new Pope.

Dear Friends, A friend responded to last Sunday’s sermon by sending some sentences penned by Thomas Merton, catholic monk and poet.  Speaking of his epiphany, Merton wrote: “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire can reach, the core […]

Dear Friends, In the dedication of his play, Man and Superman, G. B. Shaw wrote: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap…  The only real tragedy in life is […]

Dear Friends, “Sometimes I imagine my life is a series of trapeze swings.  I’m either holding on to a trapeze bar swinging along, or for a few moments I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.  Most of the time I’m hanging on for dear life to my illusive trapeze bar of the moment.”