Yesterday’s football game between Texas and Tennessee was a barn burner.  It also featured the most vulgar, public taunt/celebration I have personally ever witnessed in football.  It resulted in an unsportsmanlike penalty, but after a few plays, the player, who admittedly had a great game, was put back in.  Forgive me while I sound like an old curmudgeon, but in my day no coach would have ever tolerated it – the player would have been done for the game if not the season.  The post-game presser (the link sadly contains video of the offense – perpetuating the vulgarity) was full of apologies and excuses, but

Grade inflation is extremely real and everybody knows it.  The reason?  Somewhere in the last few decades teachers grew tired of parent raising h&%% when their child failed so the teachers started handing out passing grades to avoid the hassle.  We live in an age where we are not responsible for our own failures.  Such was the thought that crossed my mind when I read the story from this morning concerning the CDC in the NYTimes.. . .

I bought a house in rural Knox County Tennessee in 2020.  I moved into it to stay in January 2023.  I was retiring and what I wanted most was to leave behind the hustle and bustle of big city life in southern California – to be kind.  For the most part, I have gotten that.  But this weekend – not a prayer.. . .

In what is probably the most moving piece of oratory in my lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  Jim Crow is dead.  African-Americans, or whatever moniker is preferred these days, occupy, or have occupied, positions of great cultural, social and political influence – up to and including the presidency.  And yet we are as far, perhaps farther, from Dr. King’s dream than we have ever been.  We live in a culture obsessed with

Monday, The Free Press carried a very personal and heartfelt profile of a man recently deceased who had been terribly disabled.  The man, Dovie, was completely dependent on others and machinery to live.  At one point about a year an a half ago, both failed him, he fell into a coma and passed far more recently.  Born Orthodox Jew, Dovie converted to Christianity in 2020 and was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 2022.  He died quite young, but he lived quite boldly.  There is so much to be taken from a story like Dovie’s, but it is how Madeleine Kearns opens her account that moved me so.. . .

Last Saturday, one football game produced a result that can best be described as “delicious.”  Ole Miss beat LSU.  Now that is an old and historic rivalry, but that is not what made this game so special.  In recent years, the University of Mississippi (my birthplace!), has seen its football fortunes rise under the coaching of Lane Kiffin.  Last year they had a legit shot at the national championship.  But then LSU put obscene amounts of cash on the table and hired Kiffin away as the regular season ended and the playoffs began.  Kiffin had to be secreted out of Oxford on a private jet while fans jeered him from the

Years ago, I was remodeling my house and I hired a young man from church to help me on weekends.  He used the money to go on a short term mission trip with our church’s youth group.  Anyway, I was installing some piece of plumbing and needed a pipe cut.  I handed him the pipe and sent him to find the HACK saw and cut it.  When he had not returned in 30 minutes, I went looking.  He had found my fine ($150) woodworking saw and had been grinding at that pipe for 20 minutes – the only effect of which was to ruin the woodworking saw.  He then quickly learned the difference between a hack saw and a dovetailing saw. 

Residing in East Tennessee as I do, notes of Dolly Parton’s passing still ring around me, and they will for sometime to come.  I ran into a fun one on Facebook earlier this week, so fun I shared it there.  It is a video of the Cantor in a New York Synagogue singing the “Hayom T’amtzeinu” to the tune of “9 to 5,” complete with English subtitles.  The reactions I received were, let’s say, “interesting.”  I just thought it was fun and illustrated how widely loved and revered Dolly Parton is, but for some people everything is about theology.  But even those of other religions get