In a time of pandemic when stories of loss and agony and untold pain flood our screens and papers, today I want to bring you a tale of a most unlikely, but most welcome, hero. His name is Gabriel Sterling, and his official title is “statewide voting system implementation manager” for the state of Pennsylvania. He is a chunky 50-year- old, boyish-faced, lifelong Republican supporter, having worked in various campaigns for that party for nearly all his life. He even... Read more

Yesterday, I wrote an essay that I titled “Protocols of the Elders of Trump,” riffing on the scurrilous 1903 anti-Semitic pamphlet, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” I suggested that the shelf life of that nasty work, embodied most appallingly in Nazi Germany, was all too long and disastrous, feeding anti-Semitic frenzy in many countries and among many people down to this day. In like manner, Donald Trump and his numerous enablers, have poisoned our cultural atmosphere, as they continue... Read more

In 1903 a scurrilous pamphlet was published in Russian, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” purporting to be a much older document describing the supposed plot hatched by unnamed powerful Jews for world domination. Though the essay was revealed as a lie by The London Times in 1921 and the Frankfurter Zeitung in Germany in 1924, and though Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, paid for 500,000 copies of this rag to be distributed in the US during the 1920’s,... Read more

I steal my title today from that famous Tennessee Williams play, “Cat on a Hot Tine Roof,” when Big Daddy cries out in a kind of summary of the piece, “lies and mendacity!” In some 42 days, the current occupant of the White House, no slouch in the lies and mendacity department, will exit that famous abode and return to his sumptuous Florida estate. Trump’s lies or truth-stretching or resort to “alternative facts,” call it what you will, began early... Read more

I need not repeat the withering list of horrifying data pouring out of newspapers and news channels with regard to the startling surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths in this second week of December, 2020. The numbers are nothing less than catastrophic, on course certainly for many millions more infections and perhaps one-half million total deaths by Spring, 2021. That later figure represents more than all US American deaths in all wars fought in the nation’s 20th century history—nothing short... Read more

In this second week in December, 2020, a full five weeks after the November presidential election, an increasing number of persons in the country, even a piddling number of Republicans (only 27 of some 240 polled), are beginning to say publically that Joe Biden is in fact and without doubt the President-elect of US America, and come Jan.20, 2021 will actually be inaugurated and will move into the White House, forcing the incumbent of the moment to find other quarters.... Read more

There is something distinctly bizarre about what has happened since the presidential election nearly a month ago. Joe Biden is beyond any reasonable doubt president-elect of the USA, and Donald Trump will be vacating the White House on or before Jan.20, 2021. But, of course, that phrase “reasonable doubt” has not precluded various followers of the current president, with the vocal support of that president himself, from refusing to admit that Biden has in fact won the race. Just yesterday... Read more

I have doing a good bit of thinking over this election season about leadership. The utter and nearly complete lack of leadership during the monstrous and growing COVID- 19 pandemic from those we look to for help, namely from the president and his administration, has been so egregious that some have claimed that many thousands who have died from the virus did so needlessly due to the void to be found in Washington, D.C. While the virus raged, Mr. Trump... Read more

My denomination, United Methodism, has had more than its share of controversies over the 50 years of my ordination as a UM clergyperson. I began my seminary training in Dallas in 1968, the year that the Evangelical United Brethren church and the Methodist Church merged to become the United Methodist Church at a Dallas Uniting Conference. At the same time at that conference, the old “Central Jurisdiction,” a group of African-American churches, joined as well into the new UMC. For... Read more

You may recognize a quotation from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” from Act 5 that poetically hymns the power and human value of music. “What sweet music creeps into my ear.” Lorenzo here woos Jessica with music amid “the soft stillness of the night.” The title of my essay today comes from William Congreve’s 1697 play, “The Mourning Bride.” The fuller quotation is: “Music hath charms that soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak,” a... Read more