Wandering Elder

The story of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia has been all over the place.  It is not a pleasant story.  It revolves around the picture in the Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook that shows a person wearing blackface and another dressed as a member of the KKK.  Reprehensible stuff. Yet there is an aspect of this story that I have yet to hear discussed.  And that is this: why did the medical school  feel this picture was appropriate to put in a yearbook?  This was not a yearbook from the 30s either.  It was from 1984.  Surely someone along the way would have said, "Is it really a good idea to put this picture in our yearbook?"  Why is no one talking about the corporate  responsibility of this picture?  True, Northam has to deal with this as an individual.  But why aren't we asking about the culture that thought this was (a) an okay event and (b) an okay picture to publish? One of the issues we have to recognize when talking about responsibility and race relations

This past week after Christmas, I was driving around my hometown.  I couldn't help but notice how much was missing from the scenery.  The Sears was closing, the Toys R Us is gone, and there is only one retail book store left.  K-Mart is absent, as is Record Bar (which I have lamented before), and there is nothing even approaching a Blockbuster Video to be seen. Such is life, I suppose.  Things change.  But I began to think about Christmas and Christmas gifts from way back when.  Toys, in particular. Toys were what I looked forward to.  Toy stores  were places of joy and excitement.  Toys R Us was one of many: Circus World, World of Toys, Children's Palace, K B Toys... they all had an excitement and a uniqueness to them. For example, Children's Palace carried a ton of Japanese robots well before Transformers came along.  Shogun Warriors or Godiakin anyone?  Or what about Micronauts?  ROM the Spaceknight?  Even the movie Dune  had some cool toys.  And I remember find

Yesterday, I watched the delivery of President Bush's casket to the Capital.  It was a majestic event, with a degree of formality and precision of execution that I find almost breathtaking.  In the event is a reverence for the office  of President, not specifically the person, which reflects a grandeur and attitude of respect that seemed to also signal the vestiges of a fading ideal. Both the office and person of the President have become so uncivil that one wonders where the society that holds its leaders with respect belongs in a contemporary America that does not  respect its leaders because they seem to no longer respect the substance and the gravity of the offices that they hold. With the death of Bush, an old era passes away.  I cannot say it was a good era, and there are plenty of issues with which we can contend.  But it certainly feels as if an era of civility and honor are fading away. As I watched the precision of the military, I found that I was honored to be a pa

Stan Lee 1922-2018 Good bye, Stan, and thank you for all the great stories, heroes, and joy throughout the years. Excelsior! 

I was recently at a local vigil held in memory and honor of those killed at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh.  During that vigil, one of the speakers said, "This is not who we are."  Speaking of the hate mongering, violent killers, the point was that the rhetoric, the anger, the racism does not reflect the populace. Unfortunately, it does . I am not suggesting that it represents the majority.  But the fact that it exists  points to the fact that somewhere, lurking, are these ideologies and feelings.  If this wasn't truly us, this would not have happened, nor would it have been conceivable. What we run into is a fallacy sometimes called the "True Scotsman" fallacy or a fallacy of circular reasoning.  It is a way of reinterpreting evidence or claims in order to prevent the refutation of a stated position.  It works like this: A Scotsman reads in the paper and sees that a terrible murder took place in England.  The Scotsman says, "No Scotsman wo

One of the issues with which I have recently been wrestling is that there are so many versions of the Christian faith.  Even as far back as the Apostle Paul, there have been differing opinions as to what it meant to be a follower of Christ. To think about this issue is, in and of itself, quite difficult, especially if one believes that there is a particular, unified narrative and theology to be found in the New Testament.  In other words, if you think that all the books of the New Testament say and think the same thing, it is hard to consider the possibility that they do not.  It is even more difficult to think that there are voices in the New Testament that are opposed to other voices in that same New Testament. Before we approach that idea, it should be demonstrated that there are different opinions  in the New Testament.  For example  we see from Matthew and Luke that there were conflicting accounts of Jesus’ birth and lineage.   If we were to go to Mark or John for clarificatio