Sermon Preached at the Haydenville Congregational Church, Jan. 28th by The Rev. Dr. Peter B. Ives.  A number of years ago the Boston Symphony Orchestra said goodbye to their conductor, Seija Osawa, and were awaiting their new conductor, James Levine. In the interim, they invited the great Leonard Bernstein to conduct their final concert at Tanglewood in the Berkshires.  Unfortunately, Leonard Bernstein…

“We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope…” ~ I Thessalonians 1:2-3 My Dear Siblings, Brothers, and Sisters, This is a hard one to write. In late summer 2012, my family and I moved back to Northampton…

  My Dear Siblings, Sisters, and Brothers, I have been at a loss for words, not certain of how to adequately respond to the most recent mass shooting at a Baptist Church in Sutherland Spring, Texas where 26 people were killed — many of them children — and a number of others physically injured. I have been looking to the words of…

June 19 — I awoke this morning to two news alerts on my phone: both describing fatal attacks against Muslims. Early this morning in London, a man used a vehicle to plow through a crowd of Muslim worshippers who were just finishing their evening prayers for Ramadan near the Finsbury Park Mosque. While more details have yet to emerge, there seems to be…

From the blog of Annie Turner — We are in the run-up to Easter, and it always makes the hair on the nape of my neck stand up. It is so definitely not fun. I’m one of those people for whom saying even the Stations of the Cross is equivalent to getting a Root Canal done without Novocain. I just can’t do…