Archives for June 2015

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Arizona’s voters were entitled to try to make the process of drawing congressional district lines less partisan by creating an independent redistricting commission. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, endorsed what she called “an endeavor by Arizona voters to address […]

There have been various rulings by the Supreme Court in the last few days. I agree with some of them, and I disagree with some of them. The one that has been getting the most discussion among Christians is the one on gay marriage. I have been reading several analyses. And, by analyses I do […]

Once in a while Christians get it very very right. The AME church in Charleston gave an excellent example this week of how to be a Christian and influence the nation. As we all know, the mother AME church suffered a terrible tragedy at the hands of a killer. There are many ways in which […]

This has been a rough week for the USA. The shootings in South Carolina have left us all shocked. I was talking to a young African-American, whom I supervise, and told him that I never thought that I would again see a church killing like the one that happened in Birmingham, AL back in August […]

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” – J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons […]

So, this past Sunday I ventured into the dangerous grounds of teen dating with the high school Sunday school class. Nowadays this is an area particularly fraught with peril because this is the Google / Twitter / Instagram / Snapchat generation. These are the people who think that they know more than they actually know. […]

Since late winter / early spring, I have been teaching the high school Sunday School class at the parish to which I am assigned. I have enjoyed it. At the same time, I have chosen to take a non-standard approach. So, we have discussed movies like: Divergent, Hunger Games, Twilight, The Hobbit, and Lord of […]

All of us are guilty of making contradictory statements. We try to avoid them (unless we are politicians), and try to correct ourselves when possible. However, increasingly, I am seeing contradictory statements that are clear enough that it should not be necessary to point out that they are contradictory statements. Worse, there is even a […]

This is a bit of a parallel piece to a post on Internetmonk called Conversations in the Great Hall. Let me start with the same quote from C.S. Lewis with which the other article started: I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of […]

The comic above has a very accurate point when one character says, “In our haste to render each other in the worst possible way, we’re actually creating self-portraits.” We are at a particularly particularly frustrating-for-me time in the history of this country. We are not listening to each other. We are not using logic. We […]