Category: Personal
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Gain and Loss on Christmas Day
Deal W. Hudson “Heard Melodies Are Sweet, but Those Unheard Are Sweeter,” wrote John Keats in his famous “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” This explains the pleasure of memories, especially those of a Christmas nearly sixty years ago. My family lived in Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City, in a modest ranch style house. My father,…
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Carried Away by Christmas Music — A Confession
Deal W. Hudson I’m a Christmas music fanatic. A long row of Christmas music LPs still stands at dusty attention on my bookshelves. Names like Perry Como, Bing Crosby, the Kings College Choir, and Eugene Ormandy peek out from their spines. (My Christmas cassette collection was destroyed by a flooded basement), but CDs began replacing…
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Reading Myself Into the Church
Deal W. Hudson Reading, said Saint Josemaría Escrivá, has made many a saint. In my own case it has merely made a convert, but has led me more deeply into the mystery that is the Church. Thomas Merton, we recall from his autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain, was started on his road to the Church by…
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The Sublime Askernish
Deal W. Hudson I had just finished my second experience of the three-day Askernish Open at the restored 1891 Old Tom Morris course in the Outer Hebrides on the island of South Uist. As in the previous year, I was completely exhausted but completely exhilarated by my three days of walking, climbing, trudging the fairways,…
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Why I Rejected “Spirituality”
Deal W. Hudson I was newly graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, a licensed Southern Baptist ministry now at Emory University studying for a Ph.D in Theology and Literature. Prof. Author Evans, one of my teachers, an expert at French and European literature, had invited me to take tea with him in the back yard of…
Deal W. Hudson 