I read an article today on clergy educational standards, an issue that will no doubt come before the Convening General Conference this month. And it is something I have discussed many times with other leaders in the Great Lakes Conference of the GMC. In this post, I don't want to outline any particular course of study or path to ordination. But ( Read more... )

I watch this year’s election in a state of near despair. I despise both major party candidates. As for the parties behind them, I think the Democrats are dangerous fools, while the Republicans (at least, of today) are less dangerous but no less foolish. Nobody’s talking about the actual stuff that needs to be done. Some don’t want to do what ( Read more... )

I started out as a Poli Sci major long ago in the bygone days. And I have a minor in History. So you could say that I've been familiar with Alexis de Tocqueville's seminal work, Democracy in America for over fifty years. So how is it that I am now reading the actual book for the first time ( Read more... )

Years ago, one of my Explorers was grumped that his Advanced Placement English teacher told him that he couldn't use the word "leathern," because it wasn't a real word. I was flabbergasted that a guy with a Master's degree teaching all the smart, college-bound kids didn't recognize a slightly out of fashion English material adjective ( Read more... )

One hears a lot of carping about "billionaires" and "oligarchs." Once upon a time, the villains were "robber barons." Some people have a down on the rich. But not all the rich. The same people who talk about the evil rich fawn on their favorite celebrities, activists for their favorite causes, and the leading lights of their political party. ( Read more... )

The most common way to form plurals in English is to tack an -s on the end: house, houses; cake, cakes; rat, rats. Old English had several ways to do this, and some of the plural forms survive only as fossils. Take, for instance, the class of nouns forming their plurals with a final -n. There are five remaining that I can think of.

Oxen is an ( Read more... )

In Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World, she begins with the Sumerian king lists and similar ancient accounts of the beginnings of human society. The king lists give a lot of names of improbable people with impossibly long life-spans. Nobody much takes them seriously. But Bauer argues that History is the study of written records, and ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, Man could not read and write. And every child of Man born into this world learns to talk before learning to read and write. Literacy is a wonderful thing, but learning to read and write (at least, the way we do it) makes learning about language more difficult.

Languages are made up of words, and words are made up of sounds, not ( Read more... )

What does it mean to be well-educated? Well, to begin with, education is not the same as credentials (diplomas, degrees, courses taken). Some of the most well-educated people I’ve ever known were some women in my inner-city neighborhood church forty years ago who all left school about age 16 to get married, raise children, and work. Yet they ( Read more... )

As a Presiding Elder of a district in the new Global Methodist Church, I find myself in the position of “coach” for a new team, or maybe several established teams playing in a new league. I spend some time everywhere I go diagramming the new plays, and I find most players are excited about learning the new plays. But I also have to spend some ( Read more... )