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 …
Some Thinking to Do
Before I graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, I enlisted in the Navy on a delayed entry program. I had grown up in Annapolis and the idea of doing anything but joining the Navy had (I think) never occurred to me. So my parents moved from Ann Arbor to Moscow, Idaho, and I …
Killing Ants With a Baseball Bat
Some might be tempted to use the word over-reaction with regard to my interactions with Terry Morin in this space. And I agree that too much more of this would make that a warranted reaction. Now that the subject is thoroughly ventilated, there is no need to keep going over the same ground. Those who …