It was with great disappointment that I discovered that my birthday marked the Battle of Little Big Horn and the death of General Custer. Even greater disappointment came the more I learned about “cowboys and Indians.” I rode a stick horse around the house and yard in Clendenin, West Virginia, so often that the end grew dangerously sharp. I don’t know how many I wore out  . . . and there was never a day from six to eight when... Read more

I have never taken John the Baptist as seriously as the Bible takes him. He was “the not Jesus” in the story, so he vanished in my imagination. This is odd since everyone else in the New Testament is the “not Jesus,” but even a fairly minor figure like Nicodemus played a bigger role in the Sunday School stories of my childhood. The Gospels do not agree with my Sunday School. To give just one example: the first part of... Read more

Everything happening right now in the US, everything, has a piece of the Civil War in it. How could this be? Wasn’t it a long time ago? No. It was not. I am 53 this week and I knew a woman who grew up eating food paid for by her father’s Civil War pension. When an event is as big as the Civil War, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and freeing hundreds of thousands more, the chain reaction in history... Read more

We aren’t very good at accepting “endings” as fans and cry for a sequel, reboot, or continuing adventures for our favorite stories. Sometimes this works well, but usually not so much. “The End” used to appear in films and perhaps it was better so. My dad told me that at camp meeting the time would come when the sweet fellowship had to come to a conclusion. Normal life was bringing the revival to a close and one good man would... Read more

This will first be published on the day, thirty years ago, when I married Hope Lancy. If all has gone as planned, we are on an island now, far away from troubles, and full of love. Whatever is the case, and wherever we are, there is a magical place where love endures that we reach “by providence divine.” Marriage doesn’t always feel magical. Many of us reach the shores of love through storms and with great hurts. Others find marriage... Read more

If we eliminated the popular music, theater, and video dealing with romantic love, there would be little left. This would strike our ancestors as odd. They valued friendship at least as much as romantic love and certainly more than erotic love. In fact, they would have valued the duty and love owed to any guest as highly for a grownup past the urges of puberty as the demands of romantic love.  Eros is always a dubious god for the good... Read more

Do not flatter the great. That’s easy to say, but hard to do and even William Shakespeare fell for the desire to simplify history and tell a patron what they wanted to hear. Charles Dickens had Henry VIII dead to rights: The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England. Shakespeare turned him into God’s chevalier which was not accidentally what... Read more

Genius needs company, so any company that tries to build on a solitary genius will fail. How do we know? The Bible suggests it, history supports it, and Shakespeare’s career proves it. Shakespeare may have written none of Edward III, some of it, or all of it. Scholars disagree and where the experts are divided, we the mere fans must be humble. The consensus seems to be that the genius of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote about half of it. Edward III is no Henry V, but Edward isn’t Henry... Read more

Israel was on the ropes, God sent Deborah, and Israel was saved. France was ruined, God sent Joan and France was saved. If tempted to despair, then do not. God will send us His woman and God knows America needs her just now. Shakespeare understood this pattern in history better than any writer. He demonized Joan to dispel the dangerous notion that God could have favored the French and he rewrote British mythology to give England a martyr savior in... Read more