Church historian and author Diana Butler Bass suggests that the questions people ask of religion have historically been "what?" questions. What should I believe? What do I need to know? These are questions religion is uniquely situated to answer. They are the questions of my patents' generation, a generation born before, during, and shortly after…
Women have breasts. Bartam Trail High School in Florida apparently is either surprised by that fact or believes that students haven't discovered it yet. They feel compelled to keep breasts under wraps, and so have edited eighty yearbook photos to remove all traces of cleavage. I would hasten that no boy's picture was edited for…
I recognize that nobody is going to nominate me for the annual person of the year award in the above mentioned community, but I am good with that. I will just put something else in the spot on my shelf that I had reserved for that award. The truth is that while the immediate therapeutic…
A friend of mine died the other day. Since she lived alone, nobody knew. After a couple of days the neighbors noticed they hadn't seen her, so they called the police to do a wellness check. When the police arrived they found her beloved Great Dane sitting on top of her body. He wouldn't let…
For quite a while I have noticed a disturbing social media trend, especially among younger women. They post pictures of themselves looking away from the camera so you can see their (at times freakishly large) butts. Much of the time they are at least looking over their shoulder at the camera, but sometimes they don't.…
I suspect we all have had that friend - a good guy at heart but completely lacking in social graces. If you invite him over, the odds are that something will be spilled and something else broken before he leaves. He tends to speak just a little too loudly, act just a bit too impulsively,…
My father died a couple of weeks ago. I found out last Thursday, but he died the Friday before that. The only reason I found out is that my brother's ex-wife lives in Florida a few doors away from someone who used to live in the same town outside Milwaukee where my father and his…
Many may be tempted to see the fall of Jerry Falwell, Jr. to be a tragic, isolated incident of one man gone astray. It's anything but. This isn't about Jerry sitting in the corner 'observing" while the pool boy cum business partner frolics on the bed with Jerry's wife. (As an aside, since these religious…
There seem to be some pretty distorted notions of what constitutes friendship floating around lately. It seems a lot of people have bought into the notion that a friend just approves of every decision you make, no matter the consequences that are clearly going to arise for you from that decision. If you walk out…
The Puritan streak that remains deeply embedded in American culture would have you believe that morality and your genitals are intimately connected. The resulting attitudes are perhaps among the most unhealthy ones possible. They lead us to see the physical as bad, as somehow distinct from the spiritual and the holy. This view has caused…
Craig Bergland 