There’s always a block-long line at Georgetown Cupcake, where the TLC reality show DC Cupcakes is filmed. Given that the nature of television is to create celebrity, the line didn’t really surprise me. What really caught my attention on a…
Along about 1970, when I was in junior high, A new friend invited me to hang out at his house. Another invitation followed, to go downtown for the Memorial Day Parade. Who doesn’t love a parade? In the car…
Anyone but me notice the death of the religious right last week? Apparently, the religious right had started feeling poorly after Mitt Romney took Ohio on Super Tuesday and had been declining steadily since Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum quit…
I believe the Christian Reformed Church in North America and the Reformed Church in America should merge. Please tell me why they shouldn’t. I mean that literally. Please respond to this blog and tell me why they shouldn’t. This is…
The other day James Bratt posted a careful, scholarly review of Calvinism and Politics on this site. Here’s more, neither careful nor scholarly. . . . I dreamt the other night that I was driving a small car with two…
One Good Friday I heard an NPR caller say something to the effect that she could never accept Christianity because it was based on a barbaric system of blood sacrifice. Call me naïve, but the evangelical subculture I’d spent my…
“If the Messiah had come,” the rabbi asked, “would the world be the way that it is?” How would you answer the rabbi’s question? He said this sort of off-handedly during a “model Seder” in his synagogue. The rabbi was…
As hard as it may be for anyone who knows me to believe, somehow, when I was in my high school production of The Music Man, director Clarence “Bud” Bergman didn’t see me as the smooth-talking romantic lead Harold Hill,…
It’s been over a week since the Obama administration blinked and came up with a way out of their self-inflicted fight with the Roman Catholic Church over mandatory birth control coverage. The administration made a big mistake – they figured…
Maggie Smith, imperious as the Dowager Countess of Grantham, peered at the hapless vicar across from her and pronounced, “You cannot imagine that we would allow you to prevent this happening.” The “this” she was referring to was the moments-before-death…
