You have to hand it to the folks in Seattle, WA. They don't abandon a lesson plan in mid-stream. This year's East Coast RC Gay Men's Workshop (aka, The January Workshop) took place virtually and within hours of the storming and occupation by force of the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, the 6th and remarkably, it finished the weekend without once ( Read more... )

It took four years, but I think I had my first Donald Trump dream last night. It was precipitated, I believe, by an hour-long conversation with my dear, old (literally) friend Judy from Altar Guild. We hadn't been in touch for a while, ever since the pandemic shut down St. Mike's as an active center of social interaction ( Read more... )

Tuesday night was a reprise of the previous week, which is to say, we continued on the theme of politics and religion, an easy target, given subsequent events around the election. The only thing that was different was the reading assignment. We made a switch from the survey book, "Theology" by David Ford and turned to the Spiritual Reflection ( Read more... )

And, hopefully this is the last time I ever have to refer to him by his official title ( Read more... )

The reading could not have been more timely; it was a deep dive into the subject of evil, though the ianguage of the academy made it more of a survey of different approaches to looking at evil rather than evil itself. That discussion was left for my classmates to attempt and to a certain extent we were successful ( Read more... )

A little while ago I wrote a longish short story about a small town in Connecticut where as a punishment for the mistreatment of a black man enrolled at the local college, God relocated Purgatory; a place where for over a hundred and fifty years the dead returned to spend the rest of their existence until the Angel Gabriel is scheduled to announce ( Read more... )

Our EFM assignment for this week was to bring in a piece of art that represented our journey to spiritual maturity. Actually, I had only heard the spiritual part of the mission. If I'd heard the maturity part of the assignment, I probably wouldn't have attempted what I did which was to drag the Bobby Kennedy painting all the way to Manhattan for ( Read more... )

Took a quick trip Down Home this weekend. Supposedly, it was to attend a funeral, but the relationshi was so distant and so obscure that even my first-cousin Kelvin who grew up there couldn't ecplain the relationship. Suffice it to say that everyone is relatad to everyone else doen there and that eery death diminishes the community in tangible ways ( Read more... )

I was so caught up with the news about the Speaker's announcement of Impeachment inquiries into the President's conduct that I was late leaving home and didn't get to EFM class until about 6:40, by which time it was too late to sit next to Colette. It is pretty clear now that unless I am at least sitting on the same side of the room as she is that ( Read more... )

This was supposed to be a triumphant weekend for 45. Gone largely unnoticed is the fact that Kim Jong-in, the North Korean leader has indeed backed off from his comments regarding Guam. That was not a foregone conclusion. The Korean peninsula could have been engulfed in war over the weekend. The fact that it never got that close should have given ( Read more... )