Yesterday morning we woke up here on Earth and got dressed for church. Our youngest daughter, who is in year two of a dogged princess phase, wanted to wear a particularly awful pair of costume shoes, hot pink heels with little tufts of fur at the toes. “I think you should wear other shoes,” I told her.

“Mommy said I can wear these!”

“It’s true, I did,” Alia said.

“I just don’t think she should wear h-o-o-k-e-r shoes to church,” I groused.

“I’m trying not to fight with her about this on weekends,” Alia said.

“I know, I know.”

“It’s not the end of the world," she said.

"Why is church so boring?" asked my daughter on Sunday morning.

"You really think it's boring?" I said.

The Episcopal Church ordains both ladies and convicted murderers ("same dif," says the Catholic Church) in church roles, but they will serve no communion wine before its time, so former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who entered the seminary just back in 2007, has, the Post claims, gotten a "fail" on the pass/fail system of priest ordainment. McGreevey availed himself of all the traditional (and expensive) methods of reputation repair after his tabloid divorce, his "coming out" and some minor disentanglement from Jersey-ism—saying that he was "in recovery," consorting with stuffed animals to coax out his inner child, returning to his love of Jesus in [...]

On a Sunday last fall, I was working downstairs with the space heater on and the office doors closed when the phone rang. The caller ID read DAN KOIS, which meant that it was my wife, upstairs, calling our home phone from my cell phone. As is often the case on weekends, we were trading carefully-negotiated Work Periods. I was writing while she looked after the children; later, I would take the kids while she worked. Later still, we would maybe eat dinner together and then put the kids in the bath.

I answered the phone. In the background I could hear crying. Alia said, "You have to come [...]

Soul music lost one of its greats yesterday when the reverend Solomon Burke died of natural causes on a flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, where he was scheduled to perform a sold-out show. Best known for his hits "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" and "Cry to Me," which he recorded for Atlantic Records in the mid-'60s, the Philadelphia-born, church-raised Burke was inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 2001 and won a Grammy the next year, for Best Contemporary Blues Album, for his Don't Give Up On Me. He was a gospel preacher and a trained mortician and he had 21 children [...]