Do you want to be happy?   I hope your answer is “yes.”  The healthy answer is, “Yes.”  We should all want to be happy.  We should all pursue happiness most vigorously; it should be the goal of our lives.  “Happy,” begins the first word of the first Psalm : “Happy.”  It’s a Psalm that ancient texts don’t even give a title to.  It’s a kind of preface, an introduction...

Our story from the Book of Acts is from a time in the life of the apostles when they have left Jerusalem in order to bring the gospel to non-Jews as well as Jews.  They began in Samaria, and it was there that an angel told Philip simply to start walking – walking or riding an animal or anything – but to head in the direction of the far side of Jerusalem along the road that goes down to Gaza...

Easter begins in the dark, in the quiet, before roosters and dogs begin to make their noise – no light, not a sound.  Three women get up in the dark and assemble the collection of spices that they had bought the evening before, as soon as the Sabbath had ended.  When dawn breaks, they start to make their way to the cave where their friend’s broken corpse was placed.  Three days after his...

Last week, our guest preacher, Ernesto Cortés Jr., spoke also at the lunch that followed, and those of us who were there heard him quote a writer who said, “It took one day to get the Hebrews out of Egypt; it took forty years to get Egypt out of the Hebrews.”  How true.  The text appointed for today from the First Testament shows us just one example of how the people, liberated from their...

On this second Sunday in Lent, we proceed deeper and deeper into God, into Christ, and perhaps most challengingly - into ourselves.  We examine ourselves - our sinfulness, pride, our integrity and honor - and we strive to align all that is within ourselves, the worthy and the wrong, with the teachings and ethics of Christ.  It is hard work - we’ve made our peace with so many personal shortcomings...

Good afternoon.

Dean Boden and President Eisgruber, thank you for your welcome to my husband Home and myself.

This year I celebrate my 25th reunion, and I want to thank the University for keeping Princeton in this state of timeless beauty for alumni. Although Whitman College was completed eight years ago, it looks so familiar I am convinced I had actually lived there. Such is the...

Are you a person who has had a religious experience?  Have you, perhaps, seen an angel, heard the voice of God or Christ, woken in the night certain that the Holy Spirit was hovering, lovingly, next to your bed?  Have you had some kind of experience that, it is clear to you, was a holy sign?  Was it something you saw, or that was said to you?  Was it a near-death experience?  Was it the timing...

Do you talk to different people about the same thing in different ways?  I do.  To a colleague who has asked my opinion on something, I might say, “The resources and potential of both budget and audience mean that your programmatic idea is probably untenable.”   To a child who is trying to wrap a present with a too-small piece of paper (this is a true example from the recent holidays),...

J. Robert Oppenheimer once said, “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.”  I don’t know if that theoretical physicist, leader of the Manhattan Project and, later, director of our Institute for Advanced Study would ever dream that words of his would headline a Christmas Eve sermon, but there you go!  I don’t know what he was actually referring to when he uttered...

Almost 3,000 years ago, a bedraggled group of refugees returned to their war-torn home. Today, millions wish that they could have that good luck - that they could go home even to rubble, to ruins - that they could simply go home to what remains of neighborhoods in Syria, Israel, and Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rakhine state in Burma, Tibet, North Korea, tribal lands in the United States, villages...