These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples given are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

Writing poetry has proven to be a great aid in seeing what I see, hearing what I hear. From my perspective, something happens, something gets noticed. The image, the happening strikes my mind, entices some response in words. An image or sequence of images appear and enter into a line. The line bears for me a cadence and a sound. Vowels tend to be important to me and help to elicit a sequence of lines that add onto one another until they reach the point where they stop and the poem ends. Th...

These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples given are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

ese Re ective Prayers consider a pondering over the assembly of texts for a given occasion, a service at which the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary are read. e notion that inspired the process of this re ection came from e Prayers of Catherine of Siena, where the editor-translator, Suzanne No ke, O.P. , noted that Catherine’s prayers, recorded by her confessor, followed the readings at daily Mass. Over the years, these re ections have proved valuable to me and have come to be pu...

These are bible studies of a limited scale, developed and led by the author with two of the congregations he served. The first congregation was in Mantua OH in the late 1970s, from which the first three bible studies arose: Ruth, Lamentations, and The Infancy Narratives. The second congregation was in New Martinsville WV from 1998 through 2003, these being done is a slightly different style: Psalms of Ascent, Selected Psalms, The Speech of Stephan, Encountering God, Matthew 5 and Matthew 6...

I have come to consider these reflective prayers as among the most spiritually significant of my writings. I began to publish the series in 2011 and followed with more recent sequences since then. Beginning in 2024, I have been assembling in electronic form earlier sequences of these reflective prayers, moving in segments from that point where I began in 2011. This collection brings my beginning date for published items back to 2001. I find the series continuing to illumine the way the Spi...

This book joins the series of titles assembling my sequence of Reflective Prayers. Earlier productions have taken up the more recent examples of the series; this volume takes up the prior 89 reflective prayers in order. I have come to consider these as perhaps the most significant of my productions, certainly of those I continue to write. In that light, I am hoping to extend the sequence back in time through those I consider to represent a maturity in the engagement with the scriptures I h...

These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

The Bible studies I chose to do came about in answer to a request from my first congregation out of seminary. I consistently sought to present a serious, somewhat scholarly, approach to the interested among my parishioners. I would take a book in the Bible to study, assume it was written or edited to be read from the beginning, and make sense to the reader in that way. I attempted to discover for myself and my group what the book sought to convey. In this volume, the study of Luke 19:28–19...

Poetry writing has proven proficient at helping me see what is there to be seen, hear what is there to be heard. I will see or hear or reflect on something which then provides an image, a nuance that emerges in a word, a line. The single line and image, written, provides a cadence, a focus of sound and echo that invites a second line, and more. Usually, the poems come quickly and run until they stop: the poem is complete. This book draws upon such poems over a pair of sweeps of my history ...

Abbot Andre Louf said that, when a person decides to get serious about the spiritual life, s/he should acquire a spiritual director. Wayne Proudfoot argued that the form of religious experience depends upon the tradition in which it is perceived. Georges Bataille searched out the meaning of his own intense inner experience in non-traditional ways. This book seeks to follow the meaning of traditional measures of the spiritual life learned through the experience of the author once his spirit...

What if one quiet moment each week could center your spirit and renew your faith?A Third For Your Quiet Meditation is a five-year collection of weekly Christian devotionals drawn from the Revised Common Lectionary. Each meditation reflects on a verse from the lectionary texts not typically selected for Sunday preaching, offering a fresh, contemplative lens on familiar scripture. Using the broader periscope for context, these reflections create space for deeper spiritual gr...