We Americans love to upgrade ourselves—or at least give improvement a lick and a promise as we turn the page on a given milestone. Jonathan Edwards famously wrote out 70 resolutions (yes, 70!); one assumes North America’s greatest thinker and theologian also sought to live each of them out. Somewhat later, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography included … Read more
A highly-decorated four star general with a terminal degree from a major university joins the club, that ignoble band of brothers who gave in to their lusts. To be sure, his letter of resignation hit the right notes, admitting he “showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair.” Oh, would that the majority … Read more
Neil A. Armstrong, who died Saturday from complications following heart surgery, lived a unique life experience. No wonder James R. Hansen’s authorized biography termed him ”First Man.” Like Adam of old in God’s verdant garden, Armstrong stepped upon another, starker orb (no less the Divine’s) as both an individual and as our representative. The first … Read more
In the mid-1940s my father re-founded, with others, Troop 37 in a small South Carolina mill town. He resurrected what was clearly among the earliest local Boy Scout organizations in our country. In the mid-70s I re-chartered, with others, the same entity my father did a generation earlier. We both became Eagles, one of the … Read more
I was just beginning to process the death of Vaclav Havel and all he did for the cause of peace, freedom and democracy in the world when, like the insinuation of a great manipulator, news broke of the demise of Kim Jong Il. Once more the great are over-shadowed by the insignificant, the noble by … Read more