Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell

So Little Women didn’t win the Oscar for Best Film. It’s only win was for costume design. I’m in no position to claim it should have won. I liked the film. I think I appreciated the 1994 version more, if…

Football season is at last over, but imagine this scenario. Your team is ahead by a point or two. Your defense holds and the other team’s only hope is a long, long field goal. But wait, they appeal to the…

I’d never heard the phrase before -- “Crabs in a bucket.” Robert Leonard, affectionately known around here as “Dr. Bob,” used it to describe these final days before the Iowa caucuses. When I googled it, I discovered it suggests chaotic…

This story doesn’t have a beginning. I lost it. Maybe you can help me find it. I thought it began at the post office, a few Decembers ago. I’m a stodgy traditionalist who still buys the “religious” Christmas postage stamps.…

Not that long ago, I didn’t know the word meme. Then, if I recall correctly, when I first encountered it, I didn’t know how to pronounce it or really what it was. Times have changed. Those simple, crazy internet postings.…

I’m a pretty regular blood donor. At a recent donation, I ran into an acquaintance. Not really a friend, but a good guy--genial, jaunty, exuberant. A thorough-going secularist. Somehow in our encounters that always comes across. Not in an aggressive…

“Why stop at three?” This was the question a Jewish religious scholar raised about a set of essays on the Trinity. It’s been many years now, but if I remember correctly his contention was somewhat akin to Gerard Manley Hopkins…

You may wish to read my earlier post, God is/is not Conservative It’s only fairly recently that “liberal” became a bad word in the United States. After all, the US is the ultimate liberal experiment--born of the Enlightenment, about freedom,…

Conservative. It’s such a loaded term these days. Every blog. Every sermon. Every prayer. Every comment. Every word is run through the conservative-liberal detecto-meter. We get tired of hearing how polarized and irate today’s America is. Red-blue. Republican-Democrat. Right-Left. Conservative-Liberal.…