by The Rev. J.C. Austin | May 26, 2024
“Somewhere.” It’s one of the great songs of musical theatre, from one of the greatest shows in musical theater, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. It’s one of those shows that probably a few of you have memorized, or close to it. But even if you’ve never heard of...
by The Rev. J.C. Austin | May 19, 2024
The Amazon Prime series Good Omens is arguably the most overtly theological, if decidedly unorthodox, mainstream television show in decades. The premise is an unlikely friendship between an angel, originally one of the guardians of the Garden of Eden, and a demon,...
by The Rev. J.C. Austin | May 12, 2024
As most of you know, I spent all of my elementary school years here in the Lehigh Valley as a student at Cetronia Elementary School in the Parkland School District over in Allentown. But during the summer between 6th and 7th grade, my family moved from Allentown to...
by The Rev. J.C. Austin | May 5, 2024
“I loafe and invite my soul. I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” That’s the second line of Walt Whitman’s masterpiece poem, “Song of Myself,” and helps set the tone of its celebration of introspection and self-determination by extolling the...
by The Rev. J.C. Austin | Apr 28, 2024
My mom loves to tell the story of when I was about ten years old or so and she found some old letters at my grandparents’ house that she had sent to them at different times when I was younger. She started reading a few out loud to me so I could hear how she had...
by The Rev. J.C. Austin | Apr 21, 2024
I know that every generation thinks that the music of its high school and college years was particularly important, but as someone who was in college in the early 1990s, I feel a particularly strong claim to that. In those years, the alternative rock movement that had...
