At age eighteen, I didn’t drink coffee. I was a tea drinker, specifically Earl Gray. But that changed in Puerto Rico one summer when I lived with a family who invited me to stay with them while I worked at their church’s Vacation Bible School. They’d given me the only private room in their small house. I’d have been happy...
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Ethnic boundaries: apparently even Jesus had trouble with them. Case in point: Sunday’s Gospel reading from Matthew 15:21-28. A woman from "the outside," known as the Canaanite woman, spars with Jesus and convinces him to heal her daughter. And Jesus is oddly cranky about the whole thing, at least in the beginning. (Note: The Canaanite woman to which Matthew refers is...
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