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A Life Celebration: Mary Suominen
Mary M. Suominen (1928—) [Flickr page]Trudi was unhappy with her husband. This had happened before, in Germany, with a young draftsman from Dresden who got her pregnant and reluctantly married her...
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Foray into Fiction: “Jehu’s Jihad”
The screaming became the dying and the dying became the dead, and all was quiet, except the panting and scuffling of the soldiers. I focused my world into the agony of slow and secret breaths. One by...
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Getting Out
“Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive.You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”—The Eagles, Hotel CaliforniaThe world beyond the gate. Can you make that first...
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Neighbor Encounters
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And [the lawyer] said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.—The...
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Moral Midgetry
The defenders of slavery relied on the Bible. The Bible was the real auction block on which every negro stood when he was sold. I never knew a minister to preach in favor of slavery that did not take...
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Lamentation
To see vain fools ambitiously contend For wit and power; their last endeavours bend To outshine each other, waste their time and health In search of honour, and pursuit of wealth.O wretched man! In...
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Maternal Martyrdom
“They’re workhorses,” says Dr. Singer [of her patients, ultra-Orthodox Israeli women]. “Their lives, looking from the outside, look like a form of slavery, never-ending. Sometimes I’m incredibly...
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Sonnet
A friend in my old church sent me some of her sonnets recently. She has an M.A. in Theology (Old Testament), plus another one in English. A very bright woman with some eclectic interests.With her...
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Black Justice
On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the...
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Into the Abyss
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.—Job 5:7Don’t Look Down! [Flickr page]At the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we...
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Ecclesiastical Evolution
The spectacle of it! With a few powerful words yelled out a bit louder than the rest, the place erupted into a frenzy of redemption. And it happened every time. The pale upturned palms of ten thousand...
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God’s Kingdom
There are not many spirits by which we have access to the Father through Jesus Christ. There is only one, the Holy Spirit, which is of God. Neither are there many kingdoms, as the world would believe....
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Eden Found
“You put them in your mouth,” she laughed, “and you press your tongue against them, and you revel in the sweetness of the flesh and the juice, and then you swallow them. There, I told you that you knew...
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Round Trip Trauma
Now that she had seen the world, now that she had been in it–she could not go back. She tried to imagine it, for a minute, being like Brita or Nels, accepting life where you had babies and had babies,...
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A Mother of Many Children
Jerusalem, God’s Zion, came down from heav’n above.She’s our beloved mother, whom we, her children, love.It’s here that God is dwelling, in spirit here is found;of truth it is the pillar, and is it’s...
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Lucretius on Love
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.—Song of SongsPhoto credit: Rosie EnglishIt has been at least 2200 years since the Song of Songs celebrated the...
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Gutting Your Kid for God
Could he be wrong? Did he dare question the words of Yahweh, his almighty and angry God, which had been conveyed so powerfully to him in the sacred writings and the voice? And the boy screamed and...
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The Word of Life
[T]he fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.—Richard Dawkins, The...
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Faith vs. Fact: Two Opposing Sides of the Coyne
The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth. It is no more compatible for someone to be a scientist in the lab and a...
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Apocalypse Now
Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little...
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