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Prayer seems to me to be bound up with purpose. Whether the purpose is known or not, prayer seems to be, for the most part, a driven thing, and a driver, too. -Stephen Jenkinson This past Summer, Stephen Jenkinson and Dr. Martin Shaw met in Devon at St. Mary's Chapel in...

Early in 2023 Stephen and Kimberly Ann Johnson came together for a 5 Part Series on Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony. These sessions were raw, real, raucous revealing, and an act of remembering. We want to let you know the series is on sale now through August 22nd. Access...

When someone tells you news that he/she has told five hundred before you, it comes across as barely news. It's rote, and it's your turn, and that's it. Part of the disease-brief protocol I was told: "There'll be good days, and bad days." Which has turned out to be...

Alma mater they called it in more innocent but no less culpable times. An awful lot to lay on a stint in school. I brought a untutored brew of vocation and a love of the spoken word to Harvard Divinity School some 45 years ago. I had plans. Harvard had ways. They let...

With amazement and awe, we watched as tickets for the UK Prayer event with Stephen Jenkinson & Dr Martin Shaw sold out in 3 hours. After many middle-of-the-night calls across the pond, we found a different venue that can host three times the participants. The new date and location...

To know the moment that you're in, and mobilize accordingly: that's where grace and style and eloquence are born. Once there, though, it's work to find where desperation gives way to urgency, urgency to purpose, and purpose to limit. Karaoke's unbecoming when elegance and elegies are called for. There's wrangling now to...

The Orphan Wisdom project is a stout thing to manage. There are a lot of moving parts. People coming and going, life having its way.  It never was a family business though it may have looked like it from time to time. It's certainly not now, with the waters troubled...

To all of you who have lingered, loitered, listed to port or to starboard, given up or given in or gone mental while waiting even for an update as to anything Orphan Wisdom, or are awaiting the starting gun, or a sign that it even exists anymore: Good day to...

I live with someone who loves to augment the air around the place. Her friends know this about her, and so we are on the receiving end of aromatic gifts, candles and incense from the wide world. The math of incense is like the math of life, I suppose: the rumour scent...

An irony of a kind: I make what living I do with words, with speaking, yet my handwriting is a marvel of economy. Or was, before fine motor skills began obeying the passage of time. I'm careful with words, mainly, and careful about them, and for their sakes. We've flown...

Drastic: from Grk. drastikos "effective, active, violent", from drasteon 'a thing done', from drao,' to make, do, act,' which is of uncertain etymology. The sense of 'extreme, severe' is recorded by 1808. Not before. That's something to love about language: the words just obey the rolling in of the mists, the abrasions of time....

We are all of us children of a troubled time. We are surely other things, noble and ignoble things, capable of remarkable goodness, capable of making our ancestors proud. But we moderns do need to decide and decide again what it means that we could have been born in more favoured times...

Night before last, carbon payback for daring this kind of air voyage: after a five hour drive and a five hour connecting flight, a two hour layover, and three immobile hours on the tarmac we're informed something doesn't work, and at 2 a.m. we're off the plane, wandering aimless...

I've been a pulmonary refugee for some time, and have been obliged to join the geese and the butterflies and head to less acute climes when the native cold comes on. It's probably extended my days. I was ongoingly grateful for the respite, and uneasy about the clear disfigurement of the...

There are marvelous things about being on the road. There are the reminders that the world's a big place, that humans are a disparate lot, that life's not long, that you're often older than you think you are, that being right is more a coincidence than a plan, that...