Should you keep going to school? If you wish to teach at a college, in the humanities, should you try? What about the market? Any advice I give to anyone I do not know can only be generally true, so in the particulars dubious. Anything can happen and nobody should simply give up on a dream due to the practical wisdom of the moment. God has done miracles and nothing I have done is the result of anything other than... Read more
Screens have changed a good bit, often for the better. This information is (almost surely) coming to you through a screen. My Bible study today came courtesy of Olive Tree, and could shift quickly from a text on the Hapsburg family to one on George B. McClellan thanks to screen time. Bravo for screens! And yet this pandemic has reminded me that too much of a good thing, even for excellent reasons, is too much. If we assume that there is nothing... Read more
Nessie came home. In the midst of the pandemic, we realized we were ready to get another dog. We missed, even the cat Athena may have missed, a canine companion. What to do? We are not fancy dog owners looking to show or breed. Nothing wrong with those excellent hobbies or jobs, but we just wanted a dog to walk, pet, and with whom to carry on endless conversations. As a result, we found a wonderful lady who fosters dogs... Read more
Small ones delight in repetition. Children want to hear the same stories over and over again. For my children VCR tapes wore out. For the children in the College and School nursery, streaming cannot wear out, though a parent’s patience can. In my case there were some records, especially stories that I played too often. A favorite was a Disney retelling of the Tin Woodman of Oz. This recording is very odd as it credits a story at least partially written by the... Read more
The Problems of Higher Education Did Not Start Yesterday Remarkably, higher education should focus on education, but this is hard both for the students and the administrators. Learning is hard work, a full time job, and students often would prefer less difficult work or do not get the support needed to study. But browsing a Kroger Weekly Ad is the easiest job in the world. It is not even a job. When administrators came from the pulpit or the professorial... Read more
Should fans let characters go? When I heard that William Shatner’s Kirk was doing one last film in Star Trek: Generations, I bought a ticket only to have the studio dishonor the character with a brutally bad ending. Yet if fans had not kept the show alive, then the best work of the original crew would never have happened. Think Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Arthur Conan Doyle famously had bigger more important novels to... Read more
The State of May Salvation operates in the abyss. In this indescribable place, night’s power of evil compelled me to long for and loathe the world. The grass was vibrating but not for me, nor for the afternoon song birds. Dogs, children, yowls were disowning me. And so I prayed: Preserve me, Mother of God, from the tempter and his tricks. Lady, are you lost? asked the boy. The path’s over here. I came back to myself and recognized the... Read more
Mater Dolorosa This taffy tastes like coconut, Mama. Did you put coconut in it? – Coconut nothing. – Did you have a big party when you got married? – Sure. Huge. – What was it like? – Nothing. We just got married. – That’s all? – Yup, that’s it. One time we went on a picnic. She made meatballs for us to put on bread. I remember the curve of the river and sitting on the sand. It was Sunday,... Read more
If you say, “God said” and God did not say, then that is a terminal error. Prophets for Profit (TM) have caught up with that truth nowadays. As a result, they coyly suggest that maybe, perhaps, they have had a vision or some revelation. They build a brand on an outrageous prediction or two mixed up with truth. As a result, we are drawn from what God is saying, because God is always saying what God is saying. The false... Read more
We are in a pandemic and the experts do not all agree about what we should do. So what do we do? What sources can we trust? Sometimes intellectual gadflies are Socrates, most often they are just carrying a plague of disinformation. How can you tell the new thing God is saying, in John the Baptist or Jesus of Nazareth, as opposed to the grifter false prophet making profit on “words from the Lord?” When you are not an expert, how... Read more
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