There’s a wonderful country and western song entitled “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?” The sentiments expressed in that one are similar to Jimmy Buffet’s “If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me.” These are musical ways of negatively expressing that marvelous maxim about absence making the heart grow fonder. Over the past year or so, absence has become quite commonplace. During the depths of Covid time, I remember how much I missed seeing the people who would otherwise gather every Sunday in the sanctuary for worship if the medical establishment and the responsible government agencies had […]
Be Kind to God Week
Once a year the little Methodist college I attended used to have what was called “Religious Emphasis Week”, which some of us more cynical students referred to as “be kind to God week”. With some reluctance, we went to chapel religiously for a whole week. I’m not sure how much God may have appreciated our perfect attendance. Seems like there’s a month or a day for everything under the sun. April brought us Earth Day and Arbor Day. Memorial Day and Labor Day are called the “bookends of the summer”. Just this week Congress officially made Juneteenth a national holiday. […]
Around the World in Sixty Minutes
Before television and internet, someone had to bear the burden of delivering the news hot off the press to folk in my little town. Paper boys would gather with their big-basket bicycles early every morning at the bus station to receive their route bundles. We would sit on the curbs and roll each edition with a rubber band or fold them into a flat square which would sail better when thrown from bike to porch. I hand tossed the “Clarion Ledger” each and every morning, come rain or shine, and finished in just about an hour. At the time I didn’t […]
How Critical Is Your Racial Theory?
Our local school board is fighting tooth and nail over an issue that most of us thought was gone with the wind. However, some of the throw backs among us believe that they should take some sort of imaginary last stand against godless communism threatening our wonderful white way of life. When you dissect this weird phenomenon, it’s nothing but a head trip to avoid what the heart knows as a “little white lie” to a bigger truth about the mistreatment of African Americans since they arrived on these shores in the chains of chattel slavery to bolster plantation capitalism […]