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For Wilshire Baptist Church

Rose rosette. Have you heard of it? Have you seen it? Sounds lovely, but it’s not lovely at all. It’s a parasitic disease spread by tiny mites that is knocking out knock out roses all across the country. It was first seen in knock out roses in Kentucky in 2009, and the sad irony is that as knock out roses have become wildly popular for their resistance to disease, their planting from coast to coast has helped spread the one disease that it can’t resist. Continue reading “Knocked Out”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

My good friend Paul Mangelsdorf died early Saturday. I’ve mentioned him on several occasions in this blog over the past few years, usually in the context of me riding DART downtown and meeting him for lunch and noon mass at the Catholic cathedral. I call him “my good friend” because that’s how he described everyone he knew – from bus drivers to bishops. Continue reading “Where Two or Three Gather”

For Wilshire Baptist Church 

I’ve been thinking about the tragedy of the immigrants who died in the back of a truck in San Antonio over the weekend. I’ve been thinking about the horror of it, and I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to set it aside and think about something else. I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know their names or their faces. They were 300 miles away. Continue reading “Human Tragedy”