Wandering Elder

I want to offer an apology.  It is an apology for what might be called culpability or, at the very least, guilt by association.  It is to someone I will only call by his first name: Jeff. During my junior year at college, there was a moment that went from what I thought was going to be one thing to rapidly becoming something that I did not expect.  It began like this: A friend of mine asked me and another friend if we would support him in talking to Jeff out of concern for his lifestyle choices which, as far as I can remember, involved a whole lot of alcohol.  My friend Ricky asked another friend, Brent, if we could all come into his room and talk.  Ricky pulled me in and said that he was really concerned about Jeff and wanted to do something of an intervention on his behalf. I didn't know Jeff well - he lived on a different floor from me. I don't know if Brent knew him at all, but I think we all knew of the group with which Jeff ran, a group that had a pe...

Back in January (which seems a long time ago even now), I wrote about the issue of truth and telling the truth with some trepidation as it seemed with the new presidential administration that everything was on the table - true or false. It hasn't really changed.  What has  changed is the fact that now political leaders from all over the world seem to have been given (or taken upon themselves) permission to decry anything that paints them in an unflattering manner as 'fake.' Charges of abuse and of humanitarian crises can be sloughed off as "fake" or "contrived" to make the political leader look bad.  It hasn't happened yet, but it seems to me that we have set ourselves up for the whitewashing (here used with the meaning "a deliberate concealment of someone's mistakes or faults in order to clear their name") of the truth for the sake of political expediency and ego.  It also seems to be the phrase we can now utter to decry any  opini...

Today is Valentine's Day. For me, that means that it was my Grandparent's anniversary.  Today would have been their 80th anniversary.  They made it to their 64th together.  God bless them both. Other than that, Valentine's Day doesn't have a lot of significance to me.  That's because it seems to me that it foists the perception of needing to be  in some kind of ethereal love for the day to matter or, for that matter, for your life to have meaning. I know plenty of people who are lonely - some who are even married.  As I heard a commentary on Fresh Air a few days ago, "Some people did  find that special someone and it didn't change the fact that they feel alone."  For those in love, Valentine's day might be a nice opportunity to get away or have a special meal, but so should an anniversary - actually an anniversary should be more  important, I think.  And for those not in love, they shouldn't be made to feel inferior or as if their l...

One of the most confusing books in the New Testament would have to be the book of Revelation. Ezekiel and Zechariah are right up there with it, I might add, with Daniel 7-12 coming in a close runner up. The reason they are so confusing is that they are (in the case of Revelation and Daniel) apocalyptic works, which means that they purport to describe events of the end times.  Add to this that all four of these books are written with heavy emphasis on visions and symbolic language that they are not immediately clear as to their meaning. I would add that they might never  be clear as to their meaning.  Hence the centuries worth of people trying to decipher these works. For the record, I believe that these works can  be deciphered but only in their original contextual setting.  If these books were written to describe things that were centuries away, they would have had very little meaning for their original readers - in much the same way we humans tend to tal...

With the recent statements by the President that our country will prioritize Christian immigrants, one once again finds renewed energy behind the idea that his is a Christian nation and always has been.  It isn't and it hasn't.  Though heavily influenced by Christianity, we are not a Christian nation in the same way we call other nations "Muslim." That's not my point, though.  My point is that whenever a country, state, or government prioritizes a particular religion, that comes with a number of perhaps not so obvious consequences. To begin with, to prioritize means to rank and if one religion is ranked as a top priority, all others have to be relegated to secondary, tertiary, etc. or be dumped completely. Second, when a religion becomes state sponsored it no longer has a voice that can run counter to that of the government.  While the religion may have been favorable to a government (which usually lead to preferential treatment), it now has great difficulty...

Amid the noise of the news over the last several weeks, you may have missed the report of the death of Captain Eugene Cernan.  He was the last human to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.  He was 82. I mention it because he was one of my early childhood heroes.  I have to admit as a child I didn’t know his name, but I had tremendous admiration for astronauts in general.  Therefore, he was one of my unnamed heroes.  Over the years, though, I have found that the stories of the Apollo missions to still be captivating, heroic, and inspiring.  Almost a year ago when I was doing some research for my doctorate, I came across an interview Cernan did for the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon in which he talked about how his life was fundamentally changed by his trip to the surface of the moon.  Describing the experience, he said, “What I was seeing and, more important, what I was feeling at that moment in time, science and technol...

When we talk about politics, we usually talk about it in the abstract or as we might phrase it, politics in general.  These abstractions may be ideological claims or philosophical claims.  Sometimes we get specific about policies, laws, bills, etc.  Sometimes we speak of particular politicians, though usually those conversations revolve around ethics and/or name calling. What we are experiencing currently is something of an inevitable train wreck of all the above with the addition of one tremendous factor in politics: ego.  Ego makes for animosity, gridlock, and the means by which everyone can foist blame, responsibility, and end up going nowhere. For example, with the issues the US is currently having with Russia over the alleged hacking: when President Obama moved to sanction Russia it brought to the fore the quagmire that is modern political action and rhetoric. This action was something that the Russians had been pushing for for some time.  So they cou...