I had been asked to do a Bible study when I began my first church out of seminary. I agreed, so long as I could do it my way. In the fourth year of my work at Hilltop Christian Church in Mantua, Ohio, I chose to do the Song of Solomon (known in many circles as the Song of Songs). I was guided in the development in part by the then-recent anchor Bible commentary by Marvin Pope. The study influenced me greatly. In the next decade or so, I indulged a variety of works on the Song of Songs, largely but not exclusively in the Christian mystical tradition. In 1997, I found a way to work on a...

Among those under my pastoral care was a particular man with Alzheimer's disease, Matt. As a part of my care, having found that writing poetry about the situations I encounter helps me see them more clearly, I developed a collection of poems about my visits with the patient. These I collected and shared with his family, and now, under slight revision, I offer them as a view of this one trajectory with the life under Alzheimer's.

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world, populated primarily by wee folk. I found that the characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and on the page served me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly accessible, and so I begin bringing them to book form.

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world, populated primarily by wee folk. I found that the characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and on the page served me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly accessible, and so I bring them to book form.

The Bible studies I chose to do in answer to the request of my first congregation out of seminary sought to present a serious, somewhat scholarly approach to the interested among my parishioners. In every case, I took a book to study, assuming that it was written to be read from the beginning, and to make sense to the reader in that format. I was most interested in finding what the author or compiler or editor, as the case may be, sought to convey. I have found the studies of value to me personally and felt that they were generally well received as I led them. Revisiting these studies now...

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world, populated primarily by wee folk. I found that the characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and on the page served me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly accessible, and so I bring them to book form fifty at a time.

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world populated primarily by wee folk. I found the characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and, on the page, served me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly accessible, and so I bring them to book form fifty at a time. The cover drawing was done by Anne Sullivan, the author's daughter. This is the artist's conception of the cabin of...

The Bible studies I chose to do in answer to the request of my first congregation out of seminary sought to present a serious, somewhat-scholarly approach to the interested among my parishioners. In every case, I took a book to study, assuming that it was written to be read from the beginning, and to make sense to the reader in that format. I was most interested in finding what the author or compiler or editor, as the case may be, sought to convey. I have found the studies of value to me personally and professionally and felt that they were generally well received as I led them. Revisiting...

Faces and actions of people and animals, the flair of nature, and the subtleties of interaction, the way life arrives for me to observe and live, to hear and sense, to engage, that is what spawns my poetry. Those poems selected and chosen from my past, with a few more contemporary in their lure to me and my pencil, are drawn together in this collection as a sampler of my engagement with life. I hope you find them engaging and inviting, that you may entertain the actions of the poem as it writes itself upon your mind, creating there your own experience of life, readying for the open engagement...