“What are you doing?” I ask Wife. This is not an honest question. I know full well what she is doing, she is staring down the barrel of an old lever-action pop gun. The lever part is important. We’ll come back to that part. Remember that part. For those of you who don’t know what …
This is why I write to you, boys with me, girl who is gone. I write to you because when I am with you, when I look into your soft brown eyes, I do not have the words. They come to me in pieces, in a thought or a dream, and always our time is …
The doctor who claimed a link between child vaccinations and autism has been rebuked by British medical authorities for irresponsible and unethical conduct. The folk theory will continue for generations, unfortunately, because autism tends to emerge around the time children receive vaccinations. For a time my family was in the anti-vaccination camp, until I looked …
Bad faith makes bad medicine, and so does bad math Read More »
The Texas Board of Education strikes a blow against communist tracts cleverly disguised as children’s books. In other news, the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is discovered to be a former manager of the New York Yankees.
President Obama, The Washington Post tells us, will propose a major increase in education spending tonight. At first glance, one might be tempted to roll the eyes. It’s not like we haven’t been trundling along on this up-escalator long enough, after all. In the past twenty years alone we’ve doubled education spending. Yes, you read …
My friend John Miller brings the smack on modern vampires. This may be a good way to sum it up: if your bloodsucker needs hair gel, he’s really just a big thirsty sissy with bad teeth. In general, vampires ought to be scarier than personal injury attorneys. Though both species deserve a stake through their …
Isaiah to his mother: “Can I have some cereals?” Mom: “You want some raisin bran?” Isaiah: “Is not raisin bran, is raisins bran.” Another literal child. Lovely.
“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books . . . This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. …
I recently saw a news clip about a mother who ordered her son to kill his pet as punishment for bad grades (the son’s, not the gerbil’s). An investigator says the woman was raised by a good family. Maybe so. When it comes time to decide, however, where to place her three children (for she is surely …
Perhaps you’ve seen commercials for the movie Legion, which appears to be two very different movies, depending on whether you’ve seen it advertised in the theater or on your television. On television, the premise appears to be that a host of demons has possessed townspeople, who must now be fended off by the inevitable rag-tag …
If this really is “…the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” then I think we’re all going to be just fine. And I have trouble seeing how a coded Christian verse on a rifle sight, while odd, is “literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun.” …
Alder Hey Children’s Hospital does a small but important and dignified thing in burying the organs its employees stole from dead babies. It is small because babies are small, and the parts of them even smaller, and because crimes against the weakest bodies in the name of science have a sickening commonality in human history, …
The start of a new season of 24 got me thinking about that standard practice television series have of explaining what happened in the previous episode: “Previously, on ____”. Sometimes it’s a little funny because, while of course the particulars are usually quite different, in another sense what happened last week is pretty much what’s …
A new study suggests parenting reduces blood pressure. Keep in mind that they’re only looking at averages, which means that when you spike after watching your two-year old do a back flip off the bed, and then collapse into a coma at nap time, you come out right about normal on average.
This is the place where help for the orphanage is being coordinated. They’ve got a law firm working on expediting the adoption issues, and they’ve announced it’s now legal for every one of the children to enter the U.S., though apparently that’s in some doubt. It’s still wise to contact your congressman regardless. But whether …
Okay people, I don’t ask you for much, but I’m asking all of you to do two things. You’ve seen on your televisions the horror in Haiti. I have a friend who has been working for a long time to adopt a little boy from the BRESMA orphanage in Port-au-Prince, home to about 150 orphans. …
Believing, as Pat Robertson does, that the suffering of those you despise is inflicted by a god on your side, and that the suffering of those you pity is the result of a devil’s curse, seems to come awfully close to paganism. Which is ironic, because the source of Robertson’s conclusion about the Haitian curse …
Perhaps most disturbing about Robin West’s attack on homeschooling is that it’s published in a scholarly journal, even if it does come out of the University of Maryland. One might expect more thoughtfulness, even from a second-rate scholar. But instead we get breathless fear mongering like this: “In other words, in much of the country, if …
Here’s a conundrum. We put automatic sinks in public restrooms because we can’t trust our fellow man to turn off the water properly. We put automatic flushers on the toilets because we can’t trust him to flush. (We can’t trust him to lift the lid, either, so I suppose it’s a matter of time before …
I’m wondering if these researchers would have been fine with The Goonies if only all the kids had worn bicycle helmets while pedaling to the treacherous caverns.
Ordinarily I’m not a fan of government meddling, but sometimes I am ready for a regulation requiring products made in whole or part in China to be labeled as such. Poisoned toothpaste, animal food, infant formula, building products that rot and emit toxic fumes, and now deadly children’s jewelry indicate — as if we needed any …
We are in the minivan, and Wife notices trees outside a store, trees with leaves made of lights, lights that slowly change color from emerald to scarlet to the richest purple. We’ve all been a bit glum, now that the trees and lights and wreaths have all but disappeared from the city. These trees of …
Joanna Moorhead offers another example of surprisingly good advice flowing from disastrously poor premises. Among her flawed bits of wisdom: “Our children are entirely different from us. . .”; and “. . . the more you hold things to be important and significant and – worst of all – improving, the less they will care …
Leslie Fields muddles about in Calvinism and Darwinism before arriving at good advice for every Christian parent, which is to pray your child toward Heaven. I think “the perfect parent myth,” however, is itself a myth. None of us envisions he can be a perfect parent. But we ache for our children to know God, …
The thing is, I despised the happy sappy Jesus talk before I became a Christian, and I still do. You know the lingo: My personal relationship with Jesus will see me through any storm; Jesus is bigger than any of my problems; No matter what the world throws at me, Jesus will see me through… …
It’s no secret, my belief that, no matter how fetching or emotionally available a vampire is, the only proper response to him is a stake through the heart. Now Father Orthoduck opens a new can of worms, suggesting that one reason modern Americans have a tougher time slaying bloodsuckers can be laid at the feet …
“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
Some of you might recall research floating about suggesting that having children reduces happiness. My own point of view has been that immediate happiness is not the point of a fulfilling life, at least not for the Christian. Now I’ve just come across research (this is always the case for me — a day late …
Judith Woods reminds us that there’s a difference between good parental involvement and hovering overkill (i.e., “helicopter parenting“). We ought to dispense with calling it helicopter parenting, in fact, and call it marionette parenting. Parents should be in the helicopter, hovering about their children’s lives. That’s their bloody job, after all — to supervise, counsel, protect. …
“A miracle is not the breaking of the laws of the fallen world, it is the re-establishment of the laws of the kingdom of God…” (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer, p. 71-2)
