The sacrifices of the military are lost on most Americans. It has become customary to thank those serving in the military for their service. What are we thanking them for? The military is war weary. Deployments are more frequent and conflicts seem interminable—now decades long (Stop-Loss, 2008). Prolonged military sequestration is showing up in equipment failure and training lapses. For most citizens this fact is lost on them. While there are close to 1.4 million people servi

Gone are our real life heroes. It’s time for some make-believe ones. Storytelling cultural creatives must come to the rescue. We are living through a necessary national catharsis of sexual misbehavior. I presume that the reality is far worse than is being reported. But the nightly news is no longer “family friendly.” The litany of perversions across a host of industries leaves one disgusted. Social trust is in the toilet. Heroes and integrity appear to be in short supply. Cul

When people see me smoking my pipe, they often mutter, “You’re kind of ‘old school.’” I always reply with a twinkle in my eye, “It depends on what one is smoking in the pipe!” Pipe smoking is experiencing resurgence, mainly because of millennial males, who worry about the dangers of cigarettes and the image of cigars. Pipes are a happy medium and are much more social than either of the other alternatives. I’ve smoked a pipe off and on since graduate school. At the University

There are two ways to talk about a window. We can talk about its construction as is typical of an Anderson Replacement commercial. Or we can talk about it as a portal in a home that allows one to see unexpected vistas. New Copernicans see windows as more than a commodity architectural feature to a house. For the ancients, nature was just such a window. It was an icon or portal to a deeper spiritual reality—one doesn't look at it but through it. When a black bird flew across a

There are many people who are not comfortable with witches. I don’t mean “Halloween witches” or “witches-as-metaphor,” but real witches who believe in curses, hexes, and jinxes. They are the last of our neighbors we might bring home to dinner. Not so New Copernicans. They are embracing the occult warmly. Michelle Goldberg writes of this phenomena in her op-ed in the New York Times, “Season of the Witch.” Traditional Christians will tend to respond that the occult is not safe.