• Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Some Thoughts on Thinking (and Emotions)

    May 27, 2016 - By 

    Like most writers, I keep a cache of mostly random thoughts, snippets, excerpts, ideas for future projects that I store in a folder on my digital desktop. It’s a big file that I add to whenever I can catch myself in the act of thinking, and in doing so, step outside of that thinking just far and long enough to say, “Hmmm…there may be a blog (or sermon or poem) in that.” This process, of interrupting one’s unself-conscious immersion in a thoughtstream to consciously note that one is having a thoughtstream that may be worthy of further thinking, is a…

  • Politics/Culture

    Gauntlet Thrown: President Obama’s Howard University Commencement Speech

    May 15, 2016 - By 

    We live in such a cynical, angry, contentious political climate that there’s a popular meme circulating and reproducing itself like a virus with every blustery speech on the campaign trail: We’ve lost our way; America is hopelessly gridlocked, wayward, paralyzed. The only hope for our country, of course, is if the candidate describing this abysmal state of affairs is elected and can thus wave a magic wand, turn three times in each direction, stomp both feet and wipe out all of our problems (ISIS, the immigrants, the atheists, Wall Street tycoons…). This is a far cry from the themes that…

  • Politics/Culture

    Contemplating “President Trump”

    May 7, 2016 - By 

    Like the entire Republican Party establishment and, in a profound sense, much of the country at large, I am coming to grips with the cold, hard, heretofore unimaginable fact that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee. And having achieved that status, he is just a few more improbable steps away from the presidency in a year that has scuttled everything we thought we knew about probability. The thought amazes and appalls. And there is more than a middling chance it will come to pass. “President Trump.” And we, who laughed heartily at the petty, petulant, juvenile showman with…