Have a good Labor Day, America! Labor Day is meant to celebrate the contributions of the working class. The labor unions promoted it as a testament to the cause of worker’s rights. I don’t expect to see much on the origins of the holiday in America’s media this year. In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would…
A young monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to helping the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church by hand. He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript. So, the new monk goes to the head abbot to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up! In fact, that error…
That’s how I like to see it – religion flanked on either side by freedom and liberty. Liberty of religious belief and expression, freedom of religion from government intervention and freedom of government from religious intervention. Freedom of thought, freedom of mind, freedom of belief. When I was a kid, it was very common for us to say, “It’s a free country. You can’t tell me what to do.” We used it in a wide range of situations, some of…
I was looking at my dissertation today, wondering if I can yet make a readable book out of it. Now that I’ve got a little distance from what was an agonizing process (at least until the last bit, when I actually started enjoying it), it seems better than I thought at the time. Today I’m posting a very select few of the quotations I used as a kind of shorthand that helps me remember the train of thought that’s at…
What’s the appropriate reaction to something like this? Check it out. On the August 16 edition of Fox News’ Your World, host Neil Cavuto interviewed Christian author Joel C. Rosenberg, whom he identified only as a “Middle East analyst,” regarding a recent Iranian “Holocaust cartoon contest,” and why “many in the Western media aren’t seeing” that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as dangerous as Adolf Hitler. During the interview, Rosenberg warned of Ahmadinejad’s “apocalyptic mind-set,” asserting that he “is saying…
In the words of Christopher Walken in the role of The Continental, “Wow. Wowie-wow-wow-wow.” I stumbled across this today while backtracking some google searches that led people to this site. It’s always interesting to see what else comes up under the same search phrases. Go to this page at FreeMinds.org to hear the recordings. It doesn’t take long for someone who is looking for answers to their questions to be shunned. This gives a pretty good idea of their pastoral…