Sometime in the next few days the beloved wooden chalice that I selected with such care will be getting loaded onto a container vessel in the port of Haifa, where it will begin its slow journey through the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean. Along with 10.7 kilograms of books, gifts and other knick-knacks that my roommate and I ( Read more... )

If it was unguided adventure that I was still seeking, I found it. May God continue to bless whomever invented geocaching ( Read more... )

After waiting about a day and a half, the season premiere of LOST finally became available on iTunes, but we were dismayed to see that it was only the second part of it. I went ahead and downloaded it (which took only three hours)... but in order to buy the first part, we would have had to purchase the entire season. At that point, we decided that ( Read more... )

Every time yesterday's calendar date came up throughout the day, a little click went off in my head, for I knew that February 2nd was a day that I'd been anticipating for some time. The premiere of the final season of LOST aired last night on ABC... that meant that sometime last night around 3:00 in the morning, most of my friends back home were ( Read more... )

By the time I'd been living in Bethlehem for two weeks, I had a well-established daily routine down pat. We had class every morning, and every afternoon was free. Each of those afternoons would involve a nap, a shower, and a visit to the grotto at the Church of the Nativity. That aura of familiarity made Bethlehem feel like a true home to me ( Read more... )

The hike back down from "the edge of the world" was beautiful but uneventful (aside from the local merchant who referred to the three African seminarians with us as "the Obamas"). When I got to the bottom, I still had about three miles to hike up a slight incline, and so I went with my earlier idea to take a camel the rest of the way out. I'm not ( Read more... )

While there are still many sovereign nations that are technically ruled by monarchs, the concept of a king or queen with actual governing power is mostly a thing of the past. Nowadays, most kings and their royal families are little more than fodder for endless gossip in supermarket tabloids. But one nation which is still very much ruled by a king ( Read more... )

It's hard to believe that I've already been in Jerusalem for a week and a half. It may as well have been only an hour and a half - our schedule has been full enough to keep me from getting used to anything around here, and there's still so much of this wonderful city to discover. But alas, tonight I'm once again packing up for yet another multi-day ( Read more... )

The longer I'm on this pilgrimage, the more I'm realizing how brilliantly arranged the whole thing is. Not only has the order of our visits followed the chronology of Jesus' life, but with each place at which we've stayed, the pace of everything has gotten busier and busier. I feel as if we've done more in our first week in Jerusalem than we did ( Read more... )

"Our faces were devoid of any expression. We had undergone so much suffering, so much hardship, that the only reaction we could muster was the absence of tears or emotion." So went one of the many eyewitness commentaries that I read today as I slowly moved through Yad Vashem - the Holocaust History Museum here in Jerusalem. In this particular ( Read more... )