To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here If you assess the national landscape of outdoor Halloween decorations, Skelly is hard to miss. Skelly the Skeleton, who debuted at Home Depot in 2020, is a whopping 12 feet tall, “big enough to look down on a basketball hoop,” as his creators put it. The team that brought him to… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here For just one evening, the horrors of the Civil War gave way to something beautiful. On a December night in 1862, Union and Confederate troops were encamped on opposite banks of the Rappahannock River in Virginia. The battle of Fredericksburg had raged just a few days earlier. The Yankees, in particular,… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Arthur Burns was a familiar face in the nation’s capital. He served as an economic counselor to four presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan – and rose to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Along the way he also served as ambassador… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Sometimes, life turns on a watershed moment. There is everything that happens before that moment and everything that happens after. And what constitutes that watershed moment? It might be the worst thing that ever happened to you. Or it might be the best. Arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to Helen Keller… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Every set of Russian nesting dolls has an inside story. A matryoshka (the Russian word for “little mother,” pronounced Mah-TROESH- Kah) is a doll within a doll within a doll, each of them exquisitely hand-painted. Traditionally, the largest exterior doll is a Russian mother attired in a shapeless peasant jumper dress…. Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Looking for true stories of shootouts and showdowns, when six-guns at high noon served as arbiters of frontier justice? Your search will inevitably lead you to Deadwood, South Dakota, one of the roughest towns of the Old American West. In the latter decades of the 1800s, Deadwood seethed with gold prospectors,… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In his book The Origin of Names, Words, and Everything in Between, Patrick Foote explores what he calls “historic titles.” Those would be descriptive names bestowed on certain individuals because of heroism – and on certain other individuals for, shall we say, less flattering reasons. Consider Alexander the Great. The Macedonian… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here When French general Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought along with his troops a crack team of 167 scientists and scholars. Napoleon was determined to plunder Egypt of its artistic treasures. Quite by accident, his team helped solve one of the enduring mysteries of the ancient world. A French soldier came upon a large… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here During any given Sunday morning worship service, the person with the best view in the house is the one standing in the pulpit. I’ve been entrusted with that view on a number of occasions. One can see, at a glance, an astonishing spectrum of humanity: young and old, eager and bored,… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Countless residents of planet Earth can’t imagine starting the day without a cup of coffee. What most people have never suspected is that coffee was once a serious spiritual issue within the Catholic Church. Around 600 years ago, a coffee craze swept the Middle East. Muslim mystics discovered that caffeine was an… Read more »