Recently I was reading a journal article by a scholar I have read and respected over the years. In fact, the article was the transcript of an address he had given just this past October. It was recent. In his address the speaker sought to locate himself and his audience in terms of the issue before them. He asked a series of “who are we?” questions, some with answers provided by thinkers from previous we eras. Then he narrowed his thoughts to himself and his audience. Among the questions he asked was, “Who are we at the beginning of the twenty-first century?”

The premise of his question, “who are we at the beginning of the twenty-first century?”, is about the only point in the paper with which I disagreed. Maybe this past October, but as we have now slipped into 2025, it just doesn’t feel like the beginning of this century. In fact, as the Times Square ball dropped in the final seconds of Tuesday evening, we had come to the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. It is not yet mid-game or halftime. However, the end of the first quarter and the beginning of the second just don’t feel like the opening minutes of the game. Maybe Winston Churchill would call it the end of the beginning.

I had already been thinking about the end of the first quarter of the century and the beginning of the second as I read the journal article. Whether you are reading the email or the online version of this piece, you will notice the “25 Years” at the top or on the sidebar of this post. 25 years, a quarter century. It’s going to remain there all year long.

More on this later in the year. We’ll be in the third quarter of 2025 when “Observations” and its predecessors mark a silver anniversary. Indeed, since the end of August, 2000, I have been writing a weekly post originally known as the E-pistle described as “news, notes, and thoughts for the members and friends of Park Presbyterian Church” in Beaver, PA, then the LPC E-pistle for twelve plus years in Langhorne, PA, and, since retirement, “Observations” from Auburn, Indiana, (“observations on living life faithfully and fully in our ‘not the way it is supposed to be world’”).

I’ve begun to make my way through all 25 years of posts, and in August I may say something about what I have learned. I will say that as I scanned the first few years of the old Park Presbyterian posts, it is clear that there will be more to be said about the first quarter of the twenty-first century than what pundits and scholars may rightly say. Yes, a war on terror and the “great recession,” yes, cultural decay and partisan divides, but, also, the Steelers won the Super Bowl (2006), the Phillies won the World Series (2008), and the Eagles took another Super Bowl (2018).  More than that, weddings were celebrated, babies were born, the dead were mourned, classes were taught, and mission projects launched. The church and her people gave witness to the Good News when the headlines were not good and when life was just sort of routine.

I will end this post with a little bit of self-congratulation. Almost every Friday for 25 years!  I am persistent, if nothing else. The blog (weblog) was a new art form when I began posting those first Epistles at the beginning of the century. For a while it seemed as if every pastor had a blog (and now a podcast, which I will never do), but very few lasted past a month or two, and I am still writing. Good for me! Maybe it’s the force of habit, maybe something better, but I have logged the first quarter of the century with “news, notes, and thoughts” and “observations on living life faithfully and fully in our ‘not the way it is supposed to be’ world”).

I won’t say it’s just the beginning, or even the end of the beginning, but it’s been a good first quarter.