This past weekend, my home parish, St. James, Austin, dedicated their new sanctuary, and my son Chandler and I went back to be a part of it. The move to the new place had been somewhere in the back of my mind for a long time, even though the capital campaign took place while I […]
It was last week that I first noticed it. On one of my bike rides, things were falling from the trees: leaves, which were beautiful and kind of cool to ride through; pecans, which was a little like riding through a vertical shooting gallery. Sometimes when I was driving and pulled up at a stop […]
Just back from a weekend at the Austin Film Festival, where I heard the message of artistic creation spread by a number of voices, including mine. My last panel on Sunday broadcast a really explicit call to the arts: There has never been a better time to be a filmmaker, one panelist said, if what […]
“Yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!”
From the Burial Service, Book of Common Prayer
There’s a shiny plaque outside Christ Chapel at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (ETSS), where I teach and write in Austin. It has those lines from the Burial Service, and below it, simple and heartbreaking:
Michael Athey
1963-2004
I […]
Martha and I went last night to see the new film written by my friends Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, 3:10 to Yuma, and I was taken by the powerful sense of sacrifice, justice, and redemption embedded in this wonderful and violent movie.
A question I’m sometimes asked—by both mainstream and Christian media—is what on […]
This morning I was riding my bike back through Reed Park in Austin, when all of a sudden I heard the sound of falling water. Although I knew there was a lot of water in the creek—I had ridden through it twice, and it was a good foot deep each time—I had never before seen […]
