Rev. Dr. Jeff Garrison
As today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day (and a day of digging out of a heavy snow that had a layer of ice on top), I thought I would repost a review from a former blog of mine. This is a good biography of the first nine years of Dr. King’s professional life. Taylor … Read more Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr
Below is a list to books I read in 2021, along with links to books which I reviewed (Often, I reviewed several books in the same post, so you may have to look down to find the book in question). In 2021, I read 54 books. 41 were non-fiction, 8 were fiction, and 5 were … Read more Reading summary for 2021
Two days after Christmas, I headed to Southeastern North Carolina. The 29th was my father’s 85th birthday, and my sister had planned a party that I didn’t want to miss. The weather for the first five days were incredible. On New Year’s Eve, my dad and I paddled from Trail’s End to the south end … Read more I’ve been away (a mostly photo essay)
Jeff GarrisonMayberry and Bluemont Presbyterian ChurchesChristmas Eve 2021Luke 2:1-20 (verse 19) This video contains a whole service that includes music along with the homily Growing up, I never felt like our Christmas tree was the real thing. Yeah, it was a live tree; we’d never go for the artificial variety. But it was store bought, … Read more Christmas Eve Homily
I wrote this article for in 2019, on the 300th anniversary of the hymn, for The Skinnie, a magazine for Skidaway Island. I have slightly altered the text for this blog post. Issac Watt’s Role A little over three hundred years ago, in 1719, English hymn-writer Isaac Watts published the words we know today as … Read more “Joy to the World” A History of a Carol
John Hassell Yeatts, A Long and Winding Road (1989), 120 pages. The long and winding road referred to in the title is the Blue Ridge Parkway which divided the little community of Mayberry in the mid-1930s. This was at the time when the author was becoming a man. He began working at the Dan River dam project … Read more Four Books: Memories, Poetry, and a Novel
Small communities tend to do the best with Christmas parades, and the Meadows of Dan Christmas parade was no exception. The line was long and involved so many people that you would think there wouldn’t be anyone watching. But the street was filled with folks, especially kids with bags as the parade is like Mardi … Read more Meadows of Dan Christmas Parade
I lived in Petersburg, Virginia, during the first three years I was in elementary school. But only one year do I remember having thanksgiving there, with a turkey my father shot while deer hunting on the Nottingway River. The other two years, we headed back to Moore County, North Carolina for Thanksgiving. The song, “Over … Read more Thanksgiving Day, Mid-1960s
Over the past few years, I have been concerned on the lack of civility in our public lives. We see it in politics, in grocery stores, and on the highways. Before COVID, I was activity attempting to foster conversation about civility. It’s needed in our world. Because of my interest, a parishioner in one of … Read more The Death of Politics, A Review
My eyes have feasted on a beautiful colored landscape for the past month. Slowly the trees turned color. But with last week’s heavy frost, the trees are now mostly brown or their leaves have fallen to the earth, to rot into the soil and nourish another season. I thought I would share some of my … Read more Saying Goodbye to Color