Unless you are Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., you should avoid using “I have a dream” in your life. Like “fourscore and seven years ago” or anything Churchill ever said, King owns the phrase. He also had the wit and wisdom to avoid misusing his dreaming. KIng’s goal of racial reconciliation, still not achieved, is difficult, but not impossible. Nature and nature’s God contains a moral law that like the laws of science is not always easy to see, but... Read more
A Facebook friend asked me to “oppose all animal cruelty” and I agreed to do so. My parent’s new cat, Jasper the Menace, recently bit me on my sore knee and then gleefully scampered away. I oppose this cruelty. I oppose all animal cruelty, especially to other animals. When the lion takes down the injured zebra, he is acting with cruelty. I firmly oppose this action at least if it appears on my television. When Bambi’s mother, strips the trees... Read more
Thank God that no sizable number of Americans support Nazi or Soviet-style regimes. We must, however, be on our guard that naiveté does not lead us down the path to some of the problems of tyrannical regimes. While it is improbable we would end up with a tyranny in America soon, we would not want to end up with some of the bad ideas or policies eating away at our constitutional system. One way to make sure this happens is... Read more
The end of the football season is upon us. If your team is still in the NFL playoffs, this fact is hidden from you in the excitement, but the end is coming. The long winter without football is upon us. When your team wins the Super Bowl, then you can live in the glow for a few seconds until the first reporter asks the coach “if the team will repeat.” There will be the false spring of the draft and... Read more
If you love Harry Potter, then you owe a debt to Tom Brown. Tom Brown at School (sometimes Tom Brown at Rugby) is the pattern for all great English books about school life. Tom Brown, very much a boy, an English boy of his era, heads off to Rugby and is made a manly man under the tutelage of Dr. Thomas Arnold and his reform of Rugby public school. Brown becomes a decent scholar, fabulously well educated by today’s decayed... Read more
Jesus’ last name is not Christ. I heard this in Sunday School, as a joke, so long ago that I cannot remember the year or the teacher. I did not LOL. But it turns out to be a truth more needed than I might have thought: there are people out there who do not “know” what the “Christ” in Christmas means. It is a bit like a title, “President” is not Obama’s first name, and a bit like a unique... Read more
A secular New Year (and the last half of the Christmas season) brings back memories. Recollecting at fifty is good, though sometimes unpleasant, because I continue to believe dumb things. The only two goods that have ever come from my stupidity has been to share those follies with others and learn from them myself. Instead of resolutions I am unlikely to keep, this year I hope to learn even more from my past failures. Some of my failures have been... Read more
So I have this novel . . .and the publisher has fixed certain earlier publication problems. It has just been reviewed positively here. This kind review is not by our dentist, but our dentist would like to get paid. You know what to do. You can buy it here. . . It has a Kindle version! My son Ian likes it! Here is a quote from another review (the least positive): “The story itself is imaginative and absorbing. Any... Read more
The Rules: In a live reading, I live my life while reading a book and post my unedited (actually lightly edited) thoughts as I go. I then end with my final thoughts and this stands as the “review.” Thoughts Before Reading: If a free book comes in the mail, it must be acknowledged. Sarah Palin sent me an autographed copy of her new book, though that is not enough to buy me, it is enough for me to say “thank... Read more
As the son of a pastor, the grandson of a deacon, and the great-grandson of a pastor, I have known more than one minister in my fifty years. I have met pastors that were hateful, hurting, and hypocritical, but the vast majority have been heroic in their sacrifice for their congregations. I am not, of course, referring to the charity CEO that takes the title pastor, he or she has their reward, but the shepherd who shows up at the... Read more
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