The May rains were not enough and the dry spell lingered all summer, cows drank down ponds, crops failed, dust coated everything. Around 3:30am, Uncle Clellon would whisper, “Honey, get up.” We skipped coffee. I slid into the truck’s passenger seat and closed my eyes as we rode to ‘the other place’, then down into […]

Hi I am Paul Purdue, Mary Jane, Lee and Colby’s cousin, and the Pastor at Belmont UMC in Nashville Tennessee, where we believe everyone is beloved by God and that clergy generally wear robes for funerals. But I speak to you today as a family member, so I wore a suit, but I thought I […]

Do you ever think about how the Bible opens? “When God began to create…” Did you sense  the liturgical pattern: the text calling, responding, repeating the chorus like a hymn? Imagine a cantor’s melodic chanting resonating through the walls of an ancient synagogue as a new Torah cycle began with God beginning to create!  God […]

The ancient craft of letter or scroll reproduction was done entirely by hand, from the choices of the leather artisan to the scribe’s font sizing choices; these little human differences could mean that at the end of a letter there might be space for another verse. A scribe might add a postscript like Colossians 4 […]

I love Pentecost Sunday, maybe for the clamor and chaos of it- loud sounds, the crowd full of questions, bewildered and surprised by the Holy Spirit.   During college some of my curious Christian friends started visiting different churches around town. They visited a small holiness church on the edge of town. Long before Billboard began […]