Some time during my second year in college, I started writing in a journal to express my thoughts and emotions. Most mornings, now 45 years later, I still do. One day during my sophomore year in college I began subscribing to the daily newspaper in Manhattan, Kansas — The Mercury. I read the opinion page every day — reading the famous columnists of the day: William Safire, Mike Royko, Jack Anderson, Russell Baker and Mary McGrory. Sometimes I read the columns out loud in my tiny third-floor apartment in Manhattan, Kansas.
Not much has changed nearly 50 years. Reading the editorial page in the paper — The New York Times, The Washington Post — is part of my day.
In college, I loved to look up vocabulary words I didn’t know. I still enjoy doing that.
As a campus minister back in the 1980s I wrote essays in a newsletter to the friends and donors of my ministry. In the late 1990s, I started writing a religion column for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, where lived for 43 years, before moving to Phoenix, Arizona in August of 2021. Eight hundred columns later, I’m still writing them.
I tell stories of faith, write about the tensions of faith and share doubts with which I struggle.
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