Ken Frantz

We are awash in grace and don't know it. How can that be? For all our declared best intentions, the world is still a challenging place. It shouldn't be so hard given the resources and advantages at hand. Unfortunately, we need only look a short distance away to confirm our blindness in that regard. Natural and unnatural disasters have ravaged places that look eerily like the communities we live and work and play in. Is it fate or simply our turn to bear the griefs borne by so many others? Never an advocate of required suffering at the hands of a deity, I posit that grace finds us when we least suppose, encounters that are profound and deeply personal.

According to some, the hoppers are bad this year. But then again, who has hoppers and describes them as not bad? Even the most forgiving neighbors agree that the smallest of grasshopper populations can be problematic, noting the insect's mostly indiscriminate attacks on garden produce, shrubs, trees and ornamentals. We decided to tame the high grass of the back wind break and discovered countless ...

Share and share alike is a nice, if not noble, standard to embrace, but it is not enough. Say what? You mean that the relief work and humanitarian efforts spent on behalf of others do not measure up? To the contrary, they matter. Greatly. There is a need, however, to examine the implied reciprocity that naturally develops alongside responders when addressing the hurts of others.

[The body of this article was first shared some fifteen years ago, and it continues to generate robust conversation whenever the topic arises. We have ceremonies to properly dispose of worn flags. Might there be something similar for old Bibles? Oh well, into the abyss once more!]

Far too many politicians speak to desires of owning the electorate, blinded in part by suppositions of sweeping mandates that are crudely called forth but lack definition. A weariness has descended on us this election cycle, a reflection of being reduced to categories of color, age, gender, faith, sexuality, nationality, and any number of unnamed groupings that presumably ...

We all have seen it. We just didn't know it had a name. “It” is the angular gothic-styled Germanic lettering called “fraktur” that is often discoverable on bookplates, manuscripts, handbills and similar artifacts from the mid to late 1700s and early 1800s. One of the earliest stylistic schools of fraktur ascended from the Ephrata Cloister […]

After fifty-two years, the water well supplying the house we live in decided to retire, which is a polite way of saying the casing collapsed. There is never a right time to dwell on such happy events, so we looked instead to brighter elements of the situation that might ease our pain.

Religious belief is an emotional arena that encompasses the very fiber, the core, of who we are. It touches us in elemental ways, uniquely defining our personhood. The threads of our lives, if we are fortunate, are wonderfully drawn, combined with color, experience, textures and smells, and then finely woven with those of others, creating within us the fabric of amazing pattern and durability. In the same manner, our contribution to the faith product of others adds warmth and dimension to their lives in both predictable and unanticipated ways.

Advent is a time of expectant promise leading to the hope of something better. At its core, it is buoyant and uplifting, something that fills the voids that we, integral participants of the human race, often bring upon ourselves. At its least desirable are “if only” moments lived from positions of regret and remorse, times […]

It's one of those jobs you simply can't think too hard about. You know it's going to be hot, itchy, dusty, dirty and downright wearing on a person. And it doesn't matter how small the job is, when it is finished, you'll be wanting to clean up. “It” is the tear out of lath and plaster which usually begins by pulling down regular drywall over plaster over lathe over 2 X 4 wall studs. Once the rock w ...