Almost four years ago, on September 23, 2019, I posted a blog entitled My Southern Education: A Confession. It was prompted by a book I’d just read, Disunion, by historian Elizabeth Varon. I re-read my blog this spring and found it weak stuff indeed. It wasn’t much of a confession and it badly understated the ...
I’ve seldom seen a new book of nonfiction spawn so much lengthy and serious coverage as Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America. Every periodical that I read regularly seemed to come out with long reviews or excerpts from the book. Right off the bat, though, I confess that this probably says a lot about my choice ...
I happened to be watching CNN on the day after the Nashville school shooting. Reporters were gathered outside the office of Senator Lindsey Graham, hoping for a comment. He emerged. The first question asked him was if he thought that, in the aftermath of the latest tragedy, there was any chance of passing an assault ...
Like many, many parents and grandparents around this country, Lucy and I had the experience of learning of a mass shooting in a school in the city where our grandchildren live. Fortunately, our son-in-law had the presence of mind to text us, before the news broke, that his sons were safe and that the attack ...
As my long-suffering wife will attest, I am somewhat psychotic when it comes to the season of Lent. To me it’s the very heart of the church year. It gives Christians a chance to evaluate what is important in their lives and what isn’t. It is an ancient season dating from the earliest years of ...
Of the many historic figures of the Reformation, John Calvin is probably the one for whom I have the least affection. This is natural since my branch of the Jesus Movement (as our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls the Church writ large) is Anglicanism, and Anglicanism bears little resemblance to the type of Protestantism espoused ...
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” I remember very well, when in the summer of 1964, Barry Goldwater made the statement above in accepting the Republican nomination for President. ...
In early December my sister Gracie and I spent a day at the Whitney Plantation as guests of the ACLU of Louisiana. I’d visited before but Gracie had not. If you aren’t familiar with the plantation – about an hour’s drive up the Mississippi from New Orleans – it tells the story of slavery vividly ...
On Oct. 10, I turned to the editorial page of The New York Times and encountered a guest editorial entitled “Pig Farming Doesn’t Have to Be This Cruel.” The writer, Mark Essig, is a swine expert and author of a book with a whimsical title: Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig. ...
I’ve rarely come across anything more arresting than a sentence that caught my eye last week in The Guardian’s weekly environmental newsletter, Down to Earth: “Eating just one billionaire would do more to prevent climate change than going vegan or never driving a car for the rest of your life.” Who wouldn’t read on? ...
