Tim Tebow won’t be there. But don’t be surprised if God makes an appearance this Sunday, because we are entering holy days.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in perhaps the most significant case involving religious liberty and the separation of church and state in decades. But it got me thinking about more than liberty.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson, who always writes eloquently, writes eloquently of the innumerable connections between the Bible and other works of art. I think she’s on to something.

The current liturgical church year is a year to read the Gospel of Mark. But what are we to do at Christmastime with the only gospel that says nothing about the nativity?

A second prolific writer and public intellectual has died in the space of a few days. But their lives couldn’t have been more different.

So, apparently, the six degrees that used to separate you and me has shrunk. The number of people separating anyone from anyone else in the world is now 4.74.

Peter Mathieson, in his book, Birds of Heaven, made the comment that one “one way to grasp the main perspectives of environment and biodiversity is to understand the origins and precious nature of a single living form” (Mathieson, xv). Following that advice, I’ve taken up an interest in whooping cranes and am seeking to learn all that I can them in terms of their life, habitat, and conservation efforts to save them. In addition, I’m hoping to visit various places in this country where those efforts are ongoing and write about them in the future. In the meantime, I ran across this really nice video from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Service that highlights their graceful beauty and sonorous bugling.

In preparing for a class on “The Bible as Literature,” I discovered again how time and space are transformed by one written word.

In the last post, I mentioned a few examples of human influence on earth that have prompted many to now speak of the Anthropocene Epoch, the age of human transformation of the planet. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words (or more. Since then, I’ve run across several things that help us to visualize the extent of our impact upon the earth, both for good and ill

We’ve done it. We’ve remade creation according to our own needs, desires, and vision. And so it is now different than it has ever been before