I stood in Piper’s Alley, in the hallway of the Second City Training Center in Chicago, and looked at a photo of Stephen Colbert.  It was taken twenty years ago, when he was a student there.  He looked very young.  His hair was in a messy part, and there was something unruly about his jacket … Continue reading A Week in a Second City Improv Intensive

"Teach your Church, O Lord, to mourn the sins of which it is guilty, and to repent and forsake them."  This is the start of the surprising prayer that accompanies the eighth station, and it was much in my mind as I painted the women of Jerusalem.  I couldn't help thinking of all of the … Continue reading Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem

For a long time now I've been haunted by photographs of lynchings, taken a hundred years ago or less in the South.  Crowds of men and boys pose, looking at the camera, smiling, while a black body swings from a tree behind them.  Hannah Arendt famously referred to the banality of evil, but when I … Continue reading Jesus Falls a Second Time

By tradition and a handy little play on words, her name is Veronica, meaning true (vera) image (icon).  Like Simon of Cyrene, she's a stranger to the narrative of Jesus's life and teachings, although she might have been one of the women who followed him around.  But she only steps into the story as a … Continue reading A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus

I'm powerfully struck by the notion that Simon of Cyrene was just a stranger, a man on his way into Jerusalem who knew nothing of Jesus or his teachings.  Some soldier saw him, and decided to expand the mocking and torture of one Jew to another Jew, making no distinction between the person on his … Continue reading The Cross is Laid on Simon of Cyrene