(Don McGillis was the former Editor of the Berkshire Eagle and a long-time reporter for the Boston Globe. He was also my friend. He died last week after spending the night stranded on Mount Katahdin in Maine and suffering a 50-foot fall. His family invited me to share some words at his memorial service yesterday)
Book Review: “Useful Wisdom: Letters to Young (and Not-so-Young) Ministers” by Anthony B. Robinson, Cascade Books, 2020. (Link to the book at Wipf and Stock here.)
By Richard L. Floyd
This little book is well-titled, for it is both useful and wise. In the interest of transparency, let me say that I have known Tony Robinson as a friend and interlocutor for decades. During that time, I have admired his many writings, which are clearly and concisely written, and grow out of his pastoral experience and long years as a church consultant. Continue reading
On this day forty-five years ago, September 21, 1975, I was ordained into the Christian Ministry of Word and Sacrament at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. I was 26. Continue reading
My mother, Frances Irene Floyd, died on this day in 1967, 53 years ago. She was 53. She has been gone as long as she lived. I was 18 when she died and I am now 71. I have outlived her by 18 years. Continue reading
Greetings from the Berkshire Hills. I’m Rick Floyd and I’m Pastor Emeritus of the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
It will be 50 years ago next year that I walked down the Andover Newton hill and took the MBTA from Newton Centre to Newton Highlands for a job interview to run a coffee house at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church. Continue reading
I filled in to lead worship for my pastor daughter today. Her amazing worship team put together an engaging and inspirational multi-media worship experience unlike any I have ever been a part of. It’s a new world we are living in, and my message was about how I have taken the lessons I have learned from my brain injury to think about life after the Pandemic. How we might use our religious imaginations to see what “new normal” might look like, because in the life of faith there is no going back:
Ride leader. BCA Wednesday Ride
On August 5, 2000 I set off to ride the Greylock Century Ride, a grueling 100 mile ride through the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. I had already gone up and over Mt. Greylock, the highest point in the state, and up the famous “Hairpin Turn” on Route 2, “The Mohawk Trail.”
At mile 33 I found myself off the road in a drainage ditch (I found out later they are called “paved waterways” and are designed to keep then snow melt off the road.) The waterway led to a grate. It was too steep to ride back on the road or onto the shoulder so I literally went head over heels onto the pavement, still clipped into my pedals. Continue reading
“Behold I make all things new!” – Revelation 21:5
Twenty years ago my life changed forever in an instant when I flew over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my head. Like Humpty Dumpty I “couldn’t be put back together again.” The name for my new situation is traumatic brain injury (TBI), the injury so many of our troops return with from war. Continue reading
Happy Easter. The good news on this Third Sunday of Easter is that Christ is still risen. Hallelujah! But it’s a different Easter season this year, isn’t it?“ Continue reading
We are a multi-generational interfaith Jewish-Christian family. I am, as many of you know, an ordained Christian minister, but like many American families, it’s complicated. Continue reading
When I Survey . . . 