The phone rings at work. I pick it up. "You the religious writer?" I have a bad feeling about this one. (My title is religion editor but people often call me the religious editor. While I am religious, personally, my job is to write about religion, not to be religious. But that's no big deal, just fyi). Anyway, this caller tells me she has written a book called The Book of Revelation Revealed. It's not been published. She needs help getting it published. Wants me to write a big feature story about it.
I'm thinking to myself there's no way I'm going to write about someone's unpublished book about Revelation, which is a tough topic even for the best scholars, but I ask her if she's from Toledo. "Yes, I'm born and raised in Toledo and I'm a visionary. And the Toledo police have been abusing me. And the Toledo police have also been abusing my heirs who are mentioned in Revelation."
OK, I'm outta here now. I tell her, "I'm sorry ma'am, I don't think that's something I could write about."
"Why not? You don't want to help a black person with a big book that could help the whole country? You just want to die? Goodbye."
Click.
Now I've doomed the whole United States. Nice way to start the day, don't you think?
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I have a lot to do so I can't get into great detail at the moment but here are a few things I've done this week:
1. Tuesday morning, interviewed Mark Lowry, Christian "comedian." A real gem of a person, a deep thinker and very funny. He rattled my cage a little bit and I am grateful. He called himself a "recovering fundamentalist -- I used to know, now I believe. I'm really a Christian agnostic."

Lowry hamming it up: how can you not laugh at this face?

2. Tuesday night, I attended the Holy Hour of Prayer for Peace at Queen of Peace Chapel in Sylvania. Met several nuns and sat through the prayer hour in a most beautiful "chapel" -- which is bigger than most church sanctuaries. It was a beautiful experience.
3. Had lunch with Dr. Yongjin Kim, a personal hero of mine who moved from Toledo to Malawi, Africa, to run a Christian program for prisoners. Things are worse in Malawi than he realized before, he said. People are so poor that if God does not provide rain for their crops, they die. No refrigerators, no stockpiles of food, just enough to get by from day to day. He saw the prison warden's pay stub, he gets $80 a month. And that's a warden, considered a high-paying job! Dr. Kim is a modern day saint for what he's doing. He said he studied the words righteous and wicked and found that in the Old Testament, righteous means self-sacrifice and living for others, while wicked means being self-centered and not caring about anyone else. Substitute "selfish" for wicked in the proverbs and it suddenly makes sense.
4. Went to a Zen Buddhist dojo last night and sat through a zen meditation, then a walking meditation, then a Dharma talk. Another eye-opening experience for this religion editor. The people there were wonderful. Sincere, thoughtful, peaceful. They find their needs fulfilled with Zen Buddhism but some say they are Christians, that it is not in conflict with their Christianity. And get this: The zen teacher is a jazz guitarist who teaches at the University of Toledo.
5. Wrote an article that ran on Page 1 today about a group from a closed Catholic church in Junction, Ohio, near Defiance, who blocked the doors to their church when the diocese sent 2 workers to remove the stained glass windows. Here's a link.
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Today is the 27th anniversary of Janet's and my wedding. We were married in a little Catholic Church in Tampa, Fla. We had breakfast with Dana and Matt and with Cara this morning. Only one missing was Lisa, but she's in Rockford, Ill.
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I saw in today's paper that Teresa Brewer died at age 76. I interviewed her a couple of times in the 1980s and 90s and was quite taken by her, she's a very sweet and humble person. I have a photo of the two of us sitting together during an interview, taken by Herral Long. Teresa was one of the most famous entertainers ever to come from Toledo and is best known for her song "Music, Music, Music," which my parents used to sing when I was a kid ("Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon..."). Her second husband, Bob Thiele, who died in 1996, was a legendary jazz producer and he and I often got into long talks about some of the great artists he had worked with including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.
Toledo, Ohio
Oct. 18, 2007