If you’re a Quaker, you know our way of conducting the business of the meeting can be maddening. I grew up Roman Catholic, so the business of our congregation was decided by a priest, who reported to a bishop, who answered to the Pope, an old, white man who lived in...

When I was nine years old, we moved to a house with fields and woods and a creek. Several of our neighbors were Quakers, but this didn’t stop me from fantasizing about war. This illusion was helped along by a neighbor boy named Kevin who told me the hole in the glass...

I met a man recently who believes God speaks to him. Not in the way we have customarily believed God communicates with us, through the historic tenets of the Church, or through the Bible, or the witness of Jesus. He believes God speaks to him in a voice he can hear...

Last week, I received an email from a college professor who teaches philosophy and is writing a book about what he calls petitionary prayer. I can’t count the times I’ve been contacted by college professors writing books. Well, actually I can. This was the first time....

I was talking with some friends this past week and asked them, if they didn’t mind, to tell the rest of us their earliest memory. After a while I noticed a pattern emerging. No one described a mundane memory. Instead, the memories were either fun or painful. One man...

When I was growing up, a man in our town ran for town board. He had the same last name as a well-respected citizen and just enough people were confused by the similarity in names that he was elected. He made the mistake in assuming that since he’d been elected to...

I have a nifty little app on my smart phone that allows me to look up genealogies, not just of famous people, but of just about everyone, including Mr. Hoban, an elderly man who lived down the street from me when I was a kid. He was a veteran of two wars—World War I...

I’ve been sick this past week. At first, I thought it was a common cold, which isn’t a big deal. Three days arriving, three days here, three days departing. But then it went to my lungs, so I thought maybe it was bronchitis, which I tend to get this time of year. But...

The interesting thing about remaining in your hometown is the difficulty in transcending your childhood reputation. When I was in Mr. Scudder’s ninth-grade government class, I mispronounced the word seniority, pronouncing it as two words senior and ority. That was...

When I was growing up, meals were a pit stop I hurried through to get on with the race. I remember my mother asking me to sit down at the table instead of standing at the countertop to eat. Now that I’m older, I enjoy unhurried meals and plan them out days in advance,...