Reality is pushing back and we don’t like it. We like our wars quick, our victories decisive, and our soldiers John Wayne. That is not the reality of our contemporary nation or military. We need to be careful about romanticizing war through the eyes of special operations specialists—Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force, and the like. Their missions are usually short and decisive and met with overwhelming technological ability and professional expertise. The real measure of warfare is

Today my book, The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church, is born, January 16, 2018. It is a special feeling holding a copy of one's book in your hands for the first time. All authors know the feeling. Pictures of the baby’s birth tends to put the emphasis on the swaddled face of the newborn or the tearful smiling sweat-streaked face of the mother. The cameras do not record the faces of all those who served as faithful midwives and obstetricians. Before

The dynamics of cultural change are more like football than golf. Golf is a solitary sport where the individual is expected to be proficient in the woods, irons, wedges, and putters. Football in contrast is a brutally choreographed dance involving men of different sizes and skills working in total concert for a common goal. Three things are necessary for changing culture: dense network, social location, and collective curation. Historian and scriptwriters often highlight the

Trump is controversial. Trump’s Tweets are even more so—both to his supporters and his detractors. Perhaps we have been looking at them in the wrong way! Is there a method to his madness? Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff is an expert on linguistic framing. Everyone thinks first in frames. If the facts don’t fit the frame, the facts bounce off and the frame remains. So in this sense, frames rule. Lakoff argues that Donald Trump’s Tweets are an exercise in framing and

Newton was a genius, but he didn’t work alone. Sir Isaac Newton established the final synthesis of the earlier work of Copernicus. His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. It is said of this book, “The Principia is generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever written, due, independently, to the specific physical laws the work successfully described, and for