In a couple of weeks I’ll be in Georgia for my grandmother’s memorial service. I expect it will be dignified but not formal, and filled with emotion but not maudlin. Both extremes would constitute a fuss, which she would have none of. As I mentioned before, she planned for her death and made this transition […]
Sometimes Hubby’s back needs ointment. He likes Tiger Balm.
I noticed the jar’s size and shape would be perfect, when empty, for storing palm ash for Ash Wednesday. (If you ignore or cover the great cat embossed on the lid and bottom.)
I have at least one friend-colleague that’ll be imposing the eponymous ashes in a service this Wednesday. (This may come as a shock to some of you, but this may well be my least favorite Christian observance, or at least the ash-imposing part.) This raises the question, how does that little smudge get on the […]
If the title sounds like the beginning of an old joke, then it follows a week of the cruelest possible jokes. I suppose some people will find it in poorest taste that a couple of dozen revellers decided to go ahead with Southern Decadence, the “gay Mardi Gras” event, but at least that sounds like […]
As I mentioned before, I’ve noticed how low-church minister’s manuals tend to include the Episcopal prayer book wedding rite along side some other minimal service. I also can’t help but notice that Universalist and Unitarian wedding rites — even the humanist ones — take cues and sometimes whole passages from an Episcopalian rite. But […]
There seems to be no new liturgy, just cycles of revision, rehabilitation, and retranslation. The wedding services and fragments Unitarian Universalist ministers pass among themselves and down the generations are no exception.
I came across a service today that seems very familiar. It was printed in Christian Worship: A Service Book (Christian Board of Publication, 1953) […]
I’ve begun to review the Protestant wedding services of the last two or three generations. A lot of commonalities to be sure, but I’ve re-discovered two historical trends — now “traditional” — that I’d be happy to banish.
“God is sweet.” Something happened three to five generations ago in the more liberal [...]
Well, if I think weddings ought to be simpler than they are, I ought to help make it so. I also think that such service should reflect my conviction that two persons of the same sex may be married. The era of liturgical division between “holy unions” and proper marriage should end.
Here’s a rough workflow.
[…]
I’m planning out what my next blog writing projects are: this prospectus has to do with a kind of pastoral liturgical resource one sees little of.
What do you do when someone dies and there are no human remains?
This has to be traumatic for the survivors, but hardly a new situation considering the unrecovered bodies of […]
Oh dear, the bride from Duluth, Georgia with the “social event of the season” wedding wasn’t kidnapped but ran away to New Mexico. By bus. I’m sure Greyhound won’t use that image in their summer TV ads.
I wasn’t going to mention this story but PeaceBang did and I wanted to add a Georgia native’s two […]
