Walk for Women

In some countries they punish the victim. A woman who was brutally raped by seven men in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 90 lashes because the crime occurred while she was in the company of a man not related to her. When the woman appealed her sentence, it was increased to 200 lashes [...]

Joe’s Finds

 
Joe Collins, graduate student at Villanova, has  been sending me news items fairly regularly; so I decided to make him a research editor.  I am adding a page called “Joe’s Finds.”  Check it out once a week or so.
This is a self-portrait with me that he took in my front yard shortly before leaving for [...]

Jayhawks Victorious

The Jayhawks basketball team pulled out an overtime victory over Arizona tonight.  This was their first serious rival of the season.
Football?
Oh, well, football is, you know, just a game.

Border Wars

Rivalry between Missouri and Kansas goes back a little over 150 years. The Missouri compromise of 1820 brought two new states into the union–Maine a free state and Missouri a slave state–preserving the balance of slave vs. free states. The Missouri compromise also stated that slavery would not [...]

Thanksgiving Thoughts

Who would have guessed that encouraging words would come from Christopher Hitchens? Yesterday he announced on CNN that Al Qaida has been defeated in Iraq. Sometimes we are embarrassed at the prayers in the Psalms for the destruction of one’s enemies; but when you have an enemy as hideous [...]

I Was a Rampman

Almost in another life, twenty-some years ago, to support my habit of going to graduate school I worked as a ramp service worker for Eastern Airlines. It was a good job. I worked with a bunch of young, hard working, conscientious people. The job involved hard physical labor, but most of the men and women, [...]

More to Come

I’ll write a couple of posts this week. In the meantime, I will refer you to a few recent posts by Timothy Stanley, a theology graduate student currently studying in Manchester, UK. He has written a few posts on environmental themes, that overlap some of the things I have said recently, here.

You Never Even Call Me by My Name

Whether it was just a coincidence, or whether he read what I wrote about him, Dave Black said recently (Nov 9), “I have never considered myself . . . a New Testament Scholar.”
He says he finds distinctions between the academic and the devotional study of the Scripture to be superficial and misleading.
“The truth is” he [...]

You Don’t Have to Call Me Doktor, Doktor . . .

I stumbled onto a blog called Daveblackonline this week–or maybe he stumbled onto mine first. He had noticed my “Theological German” site. I looked at his site and at first he seemed to be a southern preacher, a simple, honest straight shooter. I was somewhat surprised that he had an interest in [...]

Liberal Use of Water

OK, this is my third and final post on the air and water around Liberal, Kansas.
Southwestern Kansas is pretty dry. It would not be profitable at all for raising crops like corn, if it were not for irrigation. Underneath that all that flat land is not only oil and natural gas, but [...]