A 27 Year Old’s Greater Wisdom

A 27 Year Old’s Greater Wisdom

In one of God’s “thin threads” of unexpected connections, I just finished a book about an American hero whom I did not know just a few weeks ago.  And yet her life has immediate implications for my current thoughts and actions. The book is The Appalling Strangeness of...
Policies Trump in the Midterm Elections

Policies Trump in the Midterm Elections

How should we approach the upcoming mid-term elections? With a focus on today’s 24/7 headlines, or with a longer term perspective?  Are the elections, as President Trump claims, all about him, or larger issues? As a Christian conservative with strong libertarian...
August, 1968: Fifty Years On

August, 1968: Fifty Years On

  This week in August marks the Fiftieth Anniversary of two events in the tumultuous year of 1968 which had a lasting impact on my life: The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21st, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 26th. I had...
A Lehman’s Guide to the Future

A Lehman’s Guide to the Future

This post is part of my series on Black Swans and the crucial need to keep real Margin built into our lives. Upcoming is the Tenth Anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the largest such filing in U.S. history and the trigger for the...
Faith Is Reasonable

Faith Is Reasonable

This post is for all of us who have struggled with the “faith vs. science” conundrum. I do not profess to be a Steven Pinker, a scientist, theologian, philosopher, or great thinker. I am just a guy. But for over twenty years I’ve read and studied experts on the three...
Irrational Belief Trumps Reason in an Unlikely Source

Irrational Belief Trumps Reason in an Unlikely Source

Bill Gates calls Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, “My new favorite book of all time.” Pinker’s work is a 453 page, incredibly well researched tour de force on every aspect of life across the globe since...
Amazing Love that Healed a Wretch Like Me

Amazing Love that Healed a Wretch Like Me

We are blessed to have five grown children who, with their spouses, shine brightly–first as people, and then in the areas where they have focused their gifts and talents. Our oldest son, Parker, is a doctor in Austin, and he has written a moving opinion piece in...
Destruction by Identity

Destruction by Identity

A nation that fractures along identity politics boundaries is almost certainly doomed. When Lenin and Trotsky started their rebellion against the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky in St. Petersburg, Russia in November, 1917, they expected to be arrested and...
There’s a New Tariff in Town

There’s a New Tariff in Town

Veteran readers in this space will know that one of my favorite books is Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.  See my post from 2013 entitled What We Don’t See is Killing Us for a reminder. And I will again quote several sentences from Chapter 15 which capture...
The Story after 25 Years

The Story after 25 Years

This month is the 25th Anniversary of two big personal milestones: the completion of the draft of my first novel, On The Edge, sending it to Thomas Nelson for editing, where it was published later in 1993, and writing the first pages of The President, which was...