Recent history:

Pope says Islam is violent
Islamics react with violence
Pope apologizes

It was not smart of the Pope to quote that 14th century sentence about Islam and violence. But it’s hard to argue that Islam is a religion of non-violence if, every time Islamics are offended, they react with violence.
Here’s a very good summing-up of the issue.
What […]

Further to my Waging a Living post …

The incomes of the top 20% have grown much faster than earnings of those at the middle or bottom of the income distribution. The income of the top 1% and top 0.1% have grown particularly rapidly.
From 1992 to 2005, the pay of chief executive officers of major companies […]

I just saw POV on PBS: Waging a Living, and I am ashamed that I am ever in any way discontent with my life or my job or my salary.
Waging a Living follows the lives of 4 individuals who are “working poor.” (More details about them.)
One’s a security guard in downtown San Francisco, making $9-10/hour. […]

San Antonio seems to be a city of churches.
Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, Roman Catholic: you name it, there’s a great old church here in San Antonio.
Appropriate enough for a city named after a saint, and founded as a missionary post, I guess.
Early this afternoon, I couldn’t resist taking a snap of this precious little girl sitting […]

OK, three guesses: what is this building?

It’s not a factory.
It’s not a warehouse.
Not a school.
And no, not an office building either.
It’s a close-up look of the structures immediately above the back entrance of First Baptist Church of San Antonio, where I went to church this morning. It’s an immense conglomeration of buildings that goes back […]

Outdoor preaching at the Alamo:

I talked to his buddy for a few minutes. They’re from Calvary Church, just outside of downtown San Antonio, and spend every Saturday night here preaching to anyone who will listen. Kind of reminds me of Proverbs: “wisdom cries in the streets.”
Said a brief prayer for them, wished them well, and […]

I never read newspapers. Well, almost never.
But right now I’m on a flight to Dallas, Texas, on my way to a convention in San Antonio. And I happened to pick up the complimentary newspaper while boarding the flight.
It’s a great paper, by most measures - the Globe & Mail. One of Canada’s two national newspapers. […]

Teresa and I took the kids to see the Watoto Children’s Choir tonight … wow!
The choir is amazing - loud, happy, energetic, and infectiously enthusiastic. It’s made up of about 20 kids from the Watoto children’s home in Uganda, Africa, all from 8 to 11 years old.
They’re all orphans, having lost one or both […]

Fine. I admit it. I’ve finally gone and done it - started a new blog.
On this blog, I haven’t hid that I’m a Christian. Quite the opposite.
But it hasn’t been quite the right place to develop a number of projects that I’m feeling called to work on. One, for instance, is a “translation” of the […]

OK, I guess I have to be the millionth blogger to post on the Islamic cartoon fiasco.
First off, Mark Steyn is more right than wrong in pointing out that always worrying about other people’s sensibilities is a good way to lose all our freedoms. And my good friend Mike Skovgaard echoes his sentiments.
In a […]

Note:
This is not a review; this is an almost stream-of-consciousness pouring out of emotion that I wrote immediately after reading Night.
. . .
. . .
I just finished reading Night, by Elie Wiesel. It was, as Goethe says, like an axe to a frozen lake.
Not that I’ve never read about the Holocaust before. Quite […]

Henk Berends, the chairman of Premier, is retiring this month. Here’s something I wrote for a memory book that we are presenting to him on Wednesday.
(I can post it here two days in advance fearlessly, since he is something of a technophobe, and “blog” would likely sound as alien to him as “blickfarx.”)
Without further […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.
It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.
I personally, because […]

It’s good to see that Narnia is doing well, very well, at the box office.  Take that, Polly Toynbee.
In the future, perhaps readers will need sickbags before reading your articles.

CS Lewis’ book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is being released as a movie.
It’s the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia, which are almost-explicitly Christian fables that represent the cosmic struggle between God and the Devil - and good and evil in every human heart - in childlike ways. But almost […]

Poor, misunderstood, and abused pop star Madonna is telling people to lay off Tom Cruise for being a Scientologist. As she says …

“We’re both in the take-a-lot-of-s— club together,” Madonna tells Rolling Stone magazine in its new issue. “I don’t really know what Scientology is, and because I don’t know, I’m not in a position […]

This article on the Online Asian Times by a European financial analyst (who also has posted the article on his blog) summarizes many of my fears about the United State’s current direction.
Ill-advised wars without clear endpoints, money flowing out the door like a river of cheap paper, a focus on the short-term benefits of outsourcing […]

Teresa and I had more reason than usual to be thankful yesterday on Thanksgiving Day.
We had just come into church - our church holds a special thanksgiving service - when Teresa felt something weird going on. She sat down for a moment in the parent’s room, but it didn’t go away. Her heart was racing […]