By JIM NICHOLS Early in my adult life, a wise person suggested a word to look for in scripture. You may have received the same instruction—it is almost trite, frankly—but it works for me. I suppose this word would be considered a conjunction, something that connects two thoughts. Used in scripture it relates one thought to a following one that
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Once again I offer an initial alert for a story: (1) there is a little science here and (2) there is not a fully satisfactory resolution. Reader beware. Some years ago, I received a phone call from the East Coast. The caller identified herself as a former student of mine, although I did not recall her. She
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS My elementary school was within walking distance of my home. It was even close enough that I walked home from school for lunch. We apparently had a rather long time for lunch because, even though it was several blocks, I do not remember having to hurry home and hurry back to school. It was certainly preferable to
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS The friend listened for a long time on the phone. He did not interrupt; he just listened. The two had known each other for decades and, though they seldom communicated now because of distance, they still “connected” in important ways. Initially, this was a wide-ranging conversation with lots of family and personal updating being exchanged. This last
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Let us suppose that adolescence and later adult life represent bookends of our human existence in terms of time. Granted, younger children come before adolescents, but it is in the latter that certain questions begin to arise. It is significant for my argument here that the questions adolescents ask are remarkably like the questions later adults ask.
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Most of us have been there, probably more than once. We step into a dressing room, disrobe and, perhaps, put on some medical-type clothes or gown. We might get to leave our socks on so that the hard tile floor will not be so cold when we walk gingerly to the next room. The bed we lie
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS For sports fans, this pandemic has been frustrating. Sports provide us with rhythms in the year; we use the word “season” not only for changes in the temperature and moisture, but also for which sport is when. The Major League Baseball season is trying to get a start here in the middle of the summer season rather
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Buried within this true, but weird, anecdote, is a fact that hardly anyone ponders: “How many rolls of toilet paper does it take to completely wrap a human being—head, body, arms, and legs?” One of my enriching academic experiences was to break away from the science building occasionally and audit university classes in other disciplines. One extended
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS I have mentioned before my fascination with the paradoxes of life, the opposites that must be simultaneously true and the tensions that we must accept. Lots of these paradoxes show up in scripture—for example, the last shall be first, Jesus is fully human and fully divine, if you think you can see, you are actually blind. However,
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