Learning to Pray

Our September 2024 story The Hymn in Her Heart featured Reverend Anne Saunders, who was called to be a minister in the early 1980s. Her journey as a teacher, a wife, a mother, a caretaker to her parents, and as a minister is one of profound faith. During these tumultuous times, comfort can be found by praying. Not all of us know how to pray. To learn how to pray or to learn to become better at praying, we sought wisdom from Reverend Anne Saunders.


Book review Hold the Line – Michael Fanone and John Shiffman

On the first Tuesday of this month, Michael Fanone sat in his mountaintop cabin, watching the presidential election results roll in on TV. Back on January 6, 2021, Fanone was one of the 850 D.C. Metropolitan cops who had risked life and limb by self-deploying to the United States Capitol to assist the Capitol police force in protecting the seat of American democracy from a violent takeover attempt.


Brody Hale Touches the World

Brody Hale cannot see, but he relates to the world in ways that many of us could only imagine. Blind since birth due to Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), Brody Hale practices law: estate planning, social entrepreneurship, and real estate, along with handling other small client matters. These practice areas are common for a solo practitioner living in a small town, but Brody Hale is no small town lawyer. He is known throughout the United States as an expert in canon law. He works to save Catholic Churches that have been threatened with closure.  


Carpe Diem -- Seize the Day

We’re six days past the election of former President Trump as our next president.  Both the press and social media are devoting inches if not pages of copy to try to analyze why Vice President Harris lost to Trump. The fact of the matter is that there are many reasons, and to focus on the loss itself does not leave much room to make plans that anticipate the new administration’s first days in office.  


Tsunami of Disinformation

There is something very wrong in the American culture and I am struggling to identify all of the pieces. People’s dependence on their phones, coupled with the Tsunami of Disinformation, is creating enormous ignorance. Algorithms are pushing memes, false news items, and disinformation, that specifically target users by profiling them. 


Trump – “It's the economy, stupid!”

Bill Clinton's strategist, Jim Carville, coined the quip “It's the economy, stupid!" to explain his successful strategy for winning the 1992 U.S. presidential election against incumbent George H. W. Bush. Although Carville advised Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, he apparently didn’t share that advice with Harris.


Robin Lindley Interviews History Professor Chad L. Williams

A Conversation: History Professor Chad L. Williams on Discovering W.E.B. Du Bois’s Lost Book on Black Americans and the First World War. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the legendary American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois urged Black Americans to support the war effort and enlist in the military. He believed that full citizenship would become a reality for African Americans with a showing of patriotism and sacrifice in war.


Book Review: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

It has been so long since I read “The Hunger Artist” or “The Trial” that I cannot remember why Kafka’s work is important. And, admittedly, I have never read anything among his vast collection of essays. I know Franz Kafka has long been the literary darling of notable authors such as W.H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all of whom have had no impact at all on my work as a writer. In fact, I rather detest these writers, which is fodder for another type of writing that I might indulge in but would rather not waste my time. 

 

On to The Metamorphosis….