I have the privilege of working in an 15th floor office with a view. Most people with offices downtown wouldn't consider my view to be a great view (because I can't see the Arch or the baseball stadium from my window), but it's interesting enough that most people who come to my office look out the window…
(Click on the photo to enlarge image.) I enjoyed this image of geese in Forest Park (St. Louis, Missouri), so stopped the car and I took this photo. We don't seem to have much snow in St. Louis anymore, so picturesque winter scenes are especially fun when they do occur.
I attended Barack Obama's speech in St. Louis on Saturday night. I was among a numerous other people attending -- the press reported that about 20,000 people were present. To get into the arena, those attending had to follow the line for several blocks, leading up to the door. We walked…
People have all kinds of hobbies. Some people like to knit. Other people like to collect stamps. I like to go to church while playing the role of “anthropologist.”
When I am thinking about visiting a church, my biggest decision is deciding what church to visit. That was my decision three days ago. I had already been to a stern and humorless evangelical church. The thing I remembered about that church was the scriptural quotation featured on the T-shirts of hundreds of the people attending: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” It was a quote from Proverbs 1:7. I remember thinking “Of all the quotes they could’ve chosen from the Bible, this one is strange indeed. Any good teacher knows that the best students are driven by natural curiosity and a good dose of skepticism, not by fear.”
Back to my task of choosing a church. Last week, I just happened to be in the car listening to a fundamentalist A.M. radio station when I heard neocon talk show host Paul McGuire ranting about a new crop of churches designed for young people, churches that allegedly don’t spend enough time on the Bible but, instead, cater to the social needs of the congregation. Maguire’s rant went on for several minutes, long enough for me to conclude that I simply had to go to one of these new hip churches to see for myself.
As it turns out, one of those new “emerging” churches is located about …
Another headline, another senseless tragedy. During a week full of them, this one hardly caused a blip on my radar, except that it happened here. First I read that a group of teens forced a boy to watch his mother repeatedly raped, then have sex with her himself at gunpoint.…