NSA Commencement 2006 Last Wednesday night, we had our ninth commencement for New St. Andrews College. One of the features of the evening was that we honored my father, Jim Wilson, for the impact he has had throughout the course of his long and fruitful life. Among some others, I was asked to make some …
Milestone Screwups
One of the things that Ausgustine did later in his life was to publish his Retractions, a book in which he went back and corrected earlier errors in his teaching. No getting the wrong idea here. As as a neighborhood toddler I am not worthy to come over and play in Augustine’s backyard . . …
Northern Runs
I enlisted in the Navy while I was still in high school, but didn’t have to go in until the fall after graduation. There was nothing thought-through in this choice of service. I had grown up in Annapolis, my father was an Annapolis grad, and the thought of doing something other than joining the Navy …
Odd Bedfellows
After I posted DeeplyGrieved.com (a few posts down), my wife mentioned to me another important “indicator that something is screwy” that I had missed. Once someone has enlisted in what I call “the fellowship of the grievance” (FOG) all other differences with other members of that fellowship fade into the background. Adversaries become cobelligerents, and …
Thirty Years of No Other Way to Go
Today is December 31, 2005, New Year’s Eve. It is also my thirtieth anniversary. Nancy and I were married New Year’s Eve, 1975. It took us a few years to figure out why the restaurants were always so crowded when we went out to celebrate. I met Nancy the year before we married, but I …
Philosophy and Me
I think it was Paul Simon who said somewhere that his “life of education hasn’t hurt me none.” I can’t quite say the same thing, but at least I survived it. I grew up in a conservative evangelical home, a place where Christ was consistently honored and loved. But it being the late fifties and …
Witticisms from the Congregation
This last Sunday, I started a series of messages through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The previous Lord’s Day I concluded a long series of messages on marriage (39 sermons), which one young wag in the congregation told me should be entitled the “forty stripes save one” series. And this Sunday I had to spend …
A Back Eddy in the Moscow Everglades
Let me begin by inviting the uninterested to just skip this one, a post on one particular backwater eddy in the swamp that has become the Moscow Everglades. At the same time, some may be interested in this feature of our ongoing “rage for diversity” campaign because it is part of the reason that some …
Water Still Runs Downhill
There have been no postings here for the last week or so because I was off to a family reunion (where we had a wonderful time). We were just outside of Zion National Park in southern Utah, a place of stark and majestic grandeur. At night the sky was so full of stars you could …
Snippets of the Blues
Nancy and I have arrived in Memphis for the ACCS conference this week, and I have somehow managed to get Internet access in our room. If I have a chance, I hope to post some things from this vantage in lovely Tennessee, just a half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge. Lord willing, and the …