The Chair Across the Table
A chair quietly keeps the history of everyone who has ever occupied it. Some remind us of those we miss. Others wait for someone we have not yet welcomed. Love has always known how to make room.
Peter Preble
Faith • Grief • History • Hope
Peter Preble
Faith • Grief • History • Hope
Tag Ramblings
The Ghosts on My Dining Room Wall: Learning to Listen to the Puritans Again
The figures on my dining room wall and the pencil marks of an unknown reader reminded me that history is not silent. The past still speaks, if we are willing to listen.
Beyond Separation: Church, State, and the Christian Vocation
What if the debate over church and state is older—and richer—than our modern political arguments suggest? Before we settle into today's slogans, perhaps we should return to eighteenth-century New England, where faithful Christians wrestled with conscience, covenant, liberty, and the Gospel itself. The questions they asked may be exactly the questions we still need to ask today.
Bread, Wine, and the Streets: Why the Sacramental Life Must Shape Our Protest
But if our protest is not rooted deeply in prayer and grounded in the sacramental life of the Church, it risks becoming just another form of noise in an already angry and fractured world.
Held in the Fire, Kept in Grace
“Maybe the fire you’re walking through is not meant to destroy you, but to reveal how deeply grace can hold you.”
The ‘Third Testament’ and the Prophetic Witness of Bishop Flunder: God Is Still Speaking
To understand what Bishop Flunder was pointing toward, we must begin with a truth the Church has long professed, even if we have not always lived it fully: God is not finished speaking.
Standing in the Light: Transfiguration as Invitation and Transformation
There is also something deeply hopeful about the Transfiguration. It reveals that transformation is possible.
Salt, Light, and the Courage to Speak
In times of uncertainty, the Church is called not to withdraw from the world but to stand within it as a witness to hope. We are called to be people who protect the vulnerable, who speak truth with love, and who shine with the quiet but persistent light of Christ.
Candlemas, Imbolc, and St. Brigid the Convergence of Light
Divine light does not hover above the world untouched; it is placed into human hands, it stands on street corners and city parks, entrusted to bodies, bound to history.
This is a Moral Moment
This is not simply a political moment or a cultural moment; it is a profoundly moral one, and people of faith are being asked, gently but insistently, to respond.