July 9, 2021

The Theology of Slavery as America's 'Original Sin'

To look at me you’d never know it, but my great-great-great-great [“4G”] grandmother was from Nigeria, according to my saliva, all that was needed for the laboratory to make that determination. It is difficult to know which of these...

July 3, 2021

Our Toughest Assignment

In the summer of 2009, several months before he died, my father told me he had something important to ask. He was emphatic that I had to be straight with him. “Tell me,” he said in a mixture of order and query, “where has your mothe...

June 26, 2021

The Not-So-Great American Pastime

For more than three decades, I played organized baseball -- Little League, Pony, Colt, Thoroughbred, high school, college, semi-pro, and scouting teams, and then in a fairly competitive Men’s League (pardon the archaic expression). The national...

June 17, 2021

'It’s A Good Life… Until They Kill You'

Americans of a certain age will recall a Twilight Zone episode called “It’s A Good Life.” In it, six-year-old Anthony Fremont (Billy Mumy) turns 40-something birthday celebrant Dan Hollis (Don Keefer) into a jack-in-the-box and ...

March 30, 2021

Not in our Stars, but in Ourselves

The late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to tell a story of imprisonment, based perhaps on his own. He said that once behind bars, the prisoner thinks of nothing but freedom, of escaping. Because of this, cruelly sophisticated jailers...

March 21, 2021

The settled science of 'shut up'

Ronald Reagan famously said, "The trouble with our liberal friends isn't that they're ignorant.  It's that they know so much that isn't so."  This might be the only thing our friends on the left have in common with...

February 24, 2021

Protecting free speech with a lesson from...Dean Martin

Dean Martin used to end his weekly variety show by inviting his television audience, in that faux-drunken drawl, "Keep those cards and letters coming in..."  I was too young at the time to understand, but it was practical politica...