Lawrence Hart

What as a younger man I could be flattered into believing was the eccentricity of creativity or avant-garde thinking, I now, as an old man, recognize to have been early signs of an insidious disorder. As a “left-handed Okie” boy growing up in the farmlands and oil fields just west of Bakersfield, I knew nothing of the lunatic Kierkegaard or his wild scribbling before a class in Christian philosophy where the passion of his lunacy was reduced to harmless academic categories and analyzed as sterile intellectual propositions – but no one talked about the enormous weight of suffering freighted by such madness. Continue reading

Father Larry

Do I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
St. Paul to the Corinthians

I have been thinking about apologies. And just now I remembered a cold winter morning in Amarillo, Texas, snug in our little garage apartment, when Brenda, my wife of only a few months, said in that matter of fact way of hers that I have come to value over the years, “Why is it that if we argue I always say I am sorry and you never do?” Continue reading

Father Larry

Someone recently asked me, as if my opinion mattered, what I thought of the Pope recruiting dissident Anglicans – actually soliciting whole communities of, among others, disaffected and out of joint Episcopalians. I said I thought it was a great idea – very entrepreneurial of him. In fact, I have no problem with what is often referred to pejoratively as proselytizing. Continue reading