Charles River: Essays and Meditations for Daily Reading

This collection of theological essays, spiritual meditations, public prayers, and biblical interpretations provides a focus, day by day, for contemplation and reflection. By intention they are offered in media res, in the midst of the cacophony and chaos of life and particularly of academic life. These pages are markings along the journey, on the trail, and thus perhaps signposts for others coming along the same way. To some degree, the collection responds to similar, recent publication of 200-word daily selections from the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The assembly of materials revisits a favorite form of an earlier Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman. Thurman easily and regularly captured thought and feeling in an assortment of forms--prayer, sermon, hymn, poem, litany, sermon--and worried very little about repetitions or the jostling inherent in formal variety. Charles River follows after these and similar works, and is offered as a daily resource for those receiving and offering, the divine grace of freedom, acceptance, forgiveness, pardon, and love.