Where are you taking me?

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960′s I didn’t pay much attention to the news but as a  young person living in the United States, when something important happened in the world, or our nation, I wanted to have Walter Cronkite tell me. When I was a child, it was Cronkite who shared and moderated a nation’s grief as we watched the assassination of JFK unfold. It was Cronkite who held in his demeanor, and controlled excitement, the tensions, and celebration of the first moon landing; the culmination of his reporting of the entire space exploration project. Read More »

I have often been described, and at times criticized as one who maintains, and processes an over zealous quantity of hope. I blame this on my belief in the promise of God as expressed by the teachings of Jesus, and my alcoholic mentality founded in a heavy dose of on going denial, but in this case, the use of denial to see the path towards the greater good. Whatever the case, certain things I’ve read coming out of the Episcopal Church’s National Convention (the legislative national church body which meets every three years) takes me, once again, into this field of hope.  Here I offer my impressions based on things I’ve read thus far: Read More »

Fifty years after the signing of the Deceleration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.”

Jefferson believed, sooner or later, the gift of liberty (rooted in the ideals of Reason) would prevail, and that eventually humanity would free themselves from the shackles of self imposed infancy; the intellectual act of giving others the right to think for the individual. Read More »