In the early 2000s, when I was a bi-vocational pastor for an Evanston church on Chicago’s North Shore, my wife and I had something of a Sunday afternoon ritual — a three-mile walk down Sheridan Road to Carmen’s Pizza in…
We may be living in the golden age of funny insurance ads. (Funny ads about insurance, not ads about funny insurance.) You find the ever-amiable “Jake from State Farm” trying to persuade Aaron Rogers and Patrick Mahomes that regular people…
Recently, on a swing out West by train to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, my wife and I found ourselves walking up the hill from Fisherman’s Wharf into Joe DiMaggio’s old neighborhood, North Beach. I was surprised to find myself…
On December 1, 1969, we senior ROTC guys gathered in front of a dorm TV to watch the Vietnam War draft lottery. We’d already taken our enlistment oaths and completed our six-week basic training at Fort Sill. Come summer, we’d…
Back in my days as a Wheaton prof, I used a book of informal fallacies (those lacking mathematical precision) in my introduction to logic. As I recall, it listed 100 of these cheesy shortcuts. I was familiar with the classics…
Several years ago, I heard a Catholic radio commentator say that the Islamic Middle East was so focused on the “Great Satan” (America) and the “Little Satan” (Israel) that they might miss the fact that another “Satan” was approaching from…
Hours after perhaps a thousand Trump supporters misbehaved in the Capitol (while, outside, tens of thousands of Trump supporters were well-behaved), purple rhetoric was the order of the night in the Senate chamber. A lot of verbal striking was going…
About two million Brits enlisted in the Civil Defense Service in World War II, and nearly 2,400 of them lost their lives to enemy action. These were the fire wardens, the rescue party members, the messengers, and such who negotiated…
At a recent gathering of Baptists, an adept assured us that Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Theory supplied us with “analytical tools” offering us “selective insights” for employment in our quest to “understand multifaceted social dynamics.” We just had to…