I have always been a U.S. history reader since my first years of exposure to it from a gruffy old farmer/teacher in the public school system. He taught me that if you want to really understand something you need to get as close to the source as you can. Learn what the founders thought. During the years since that time I have read extensively about the people around the forming of our nation, most particularly Jefferson, Washington, and Madison.  Learning about their lives and how they thought gave me an insight into what the country was meant to be. It … Continue reading Redemptive Violence…

We spent a couple of days in Branson Missouri this past week to get us in the holiday spirit. It is on the list as the third most celebrated Christmas in the country.  Silver Dollar City which is a theme park near Branson was advertised as have over 5 million Christmas tree lights and they were impressive indeed!  Almost worth all the hassle to get there and manage the hordes! Below are some pictures of the park.  The tree in the center of the town square  was awesome.  I took an iPhone video of it but it is too big … Continue reading Branson Christmas

Let’s spend the next couple of days forgetting about our political situation and look exclusively at other things…. I know I am probably showing my age here but when I thought of the phrase in the title above I thought of Bing Crosby’s 1943 song about soldiers in WWII dreaming of Christmas. But when I put the phrase to Wiki I discovered that it now has multiple references. Aside from that this post is actually about the contents of personal dreams and how they let me live out an alternate life. Yeah, this is a Walter Mitty type post.  :) … Continue reading If Only In My Dreams…

Saudi Arabia’s justice ministry plans to sue a Twitter user who compared the death sentence handed down on Friday to a Palestinian poet to the punishments meted out by Islamic State, a major government-aligned newspaper reported on Wednesday…. In January, liberal writer Raif Badawi was flogged 50 times after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy last year, prompting an international outcry. Badawi remains in prison, but diplomats say he is unlikely to be flogged again. In 2014, a Saudi court in Riyadh sentenced three lawyers to up to eight years in jail after … Continue reading Poet’s death sentence ‘ISIS-like’

Biblical literalism as an interpretative method can be traced back to Martin Luther’s denunciation of the Catholic Church and his use of scripture to undermine their authority. Martin Luther’s democratic mission later combined with the tenets of the scientific revolution and fundamentalist politics to produce biblical literalism, the idea that the Bible is a series of testable assertions that can be proven or disproven and that a layman can read and understand the meaning of scripture. Biblical literalism is absurd, but it is simple. The fundamentalist is not interested in deeper truths, but rather weaponizing the Bible. A perfect example … Continue reading Weaponizing The Bible…

N It is interesting to see that even the Peanuts gallery can see that the vast majority of wars in my lifetime are religious in nature. Of course the Middle East is the hotbed for many of them. Maybe Lucy needs to open an office on Capital Hill… Continue reading Rethinking the Whole Religious Thing…

Is ISIL a Muslim Organization? Is the KKK a Christian Organization? The first question came up during a recent Obama press conference in Turkey after the Paris terrorist attacks.  Yeah, I watched the entire thing. President Obama sure can talk :)    At near the end of the 50 minutes or so of questions he made the comment that one thing the mainstream Muslim community needs to do much more of is to try to understand what it is about the way they currently practice their religion that allows so many follower to take a radical path?( I wish I had … Continue reading ISIS and the KKK… Whose Responsibility??

This editorial cartoon sums it up for me. I’m not crazy about Hillary but she certainly beats all the GOP alternatives right now. Continue reading The Latest GOP Debate

I want to re-visit an institution in Omaha Nebraska that we visited in 2012. This time with a focus on the many bronzes they have throughout the museum. The building was originally the passenger train depot for the city and all the bronzes show the activity as it probably was 80 years ago. Click on any of the pictures below to see an enlarged slideshow view.   Continue reading Life in Bronze…

Thanks Gary Varel for making my morning…LOL… Continue reading Merging Two Media Events…. Halarious

As mentioned in the text on Wiki about House on the Rock, it probably is not well known outside of the Midwest. I have visited there on two occasions years apart and was equally amazed by the place each time.  Here is a little about the story of its creator the house. The House on the Rock, originally opened in 1959, is a complex of architecturally unique rooms, streets, gardens and shops designed by Alex Jordan, Jr. It is located north of Dodgeville, a city in Iowa County, south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and is a regional tourist attraction…. Both … Continue reading House On The Rock…

I was browsing through my photo archive and decided to pull out some pics from my Guadalajara Mexico trip of twenty years ago. (how could it be that long ago!!; seems almost like yesterday). I spent quite a lot of time there in the 1990s on business. The “America” in the category  is not just the United States but also includes Canada and Mexico. I love both of those countries as well as my own. I did it a little differently this time as I added some captions to indicate why I picked these particular pictures. As usual click on … Continue reading GDL…

A lot of Americans believe quite deeply that many of our societal and economic ills can be traced back to the crumbling institution of marriage. But even if you take that as an article of faith, “fixing” marriage is a problem with no ready solution…. Source:  Can America really ‘strengthen marriage’?. I admit I was drawn more to this article because of the graphic above than its subject but once I started reading I found that it appears no one really knows how to fix marriage. Not the Conservatives, not the progressives.  To many of our millennials and beyond it … Continue reading Strengthening marriage?

Before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the angels proclaimed “peace on earth, good will to all people.” We imagine the scene as a silent night–all calm, all bright. But Matthew’s gospel tells a different story. A paranoid puppet king commit outrageous acts of terror when he heard rumors of Jesus’ birth. A hit was put out on every boy under the age of two. In a world ruled by people like Herrod, all was not calm. All was not bright. Folks kept their heads down in darkness, praying to make it through. Mary and Joseph were afraid, and for good … Continue reading The Christmas Story…. Of Fear

I saw a short snippet on the PBS Newshour a while ago about a drive to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name for several Princeton building because of his not rejecting racism strongly enough in his times. This is very much in line with my latest favorite words found in the title of this post.  It is easy to look to the past with the wisdom of hindsight but in my mind it is simply not valid to do that.  For you sports nuts out there this is often called “Monday morning quarterbacking”. It easy to see problems when you take them … Continue reading Judging The Past By The Criteria Of The Present..

Danforth’s new book argues that religion does have a place in politics, but in a different manner than we’ve seen in recent years. What’s missing in the modern political world,  Danforth writes, is “the commitment to look beyond the self and serve the public good” — something encouraged by religion. Source: The positive role religion can play in politics | Minnesota Public Radio News For more than a decade, John Danforth, who is also an ordained Episcopal priest, has written extensively on the negative use of religion as a divisive force in American politics. Now he turns to the positive, … Continue reading Looking Beyond Self…

Continue reading No Room In the Inn…

Mr Cummings, who taught me English at school was an almost registered “Odd Man.” You could see even then, and I was about eleven when he taught me, that most of his conversations were with himself, which he engaged you in if you were in his room or class, but they were not quiet conversations. He was always urgent, engaged, non-conformist and anxious not to waste a breath on just getting by…. He made me realize that troubled people are often the bravest and most determined people you will meet. That for them to wake up and live an unexceptional … Continue reading Troubled Souls….

OK, I think the title probably got your attention. Maybe I should have said it is not totally or even mostly about race. Prejudices and discrimination in this country come from a myriad of sources.  With this post I won’t try to convince you that any particular one is greater magnitude than the others but only that it exists on many different arenas. I will give you several different examples but will say that I believe there is one cause for most of it. It’s about physical differences and handicaps — As a deaf man for almost thirty years I … Continue reading It’s Not About Race….

I have been playing around with the header of RJ’sCorner for a few days now. I hope at least a few of you guys notice the improvements.  The saying above is new to the header. It is about wisdom and how it is only accomplished through years of experiencing the dichotomies of life. I am one who appreciates the wisdom of those who have lived a long time on this earth. They have probably experienced things that I have not. They have lessons to teach.  One of my favorite books is Having Our Say – The Delaney Sister’ First 100 … Continue reading To Be Old and Wise….

The War on Christmas has been going on for a decade or so now, and though it may not rage with quite the fury it once did, it still serves everyone’s interests. The conservative Christians who gear up for the war every year get to feed their sense of persecution and the belief that their lives are a righteous struggle against the large and sinister forces working to destroy them. Conservative media get something to shake their fists at them for a couple of months. And the rest of us get to feel superior and mock them for being so … Continue reading I Am Sick Of People Saying “I’m Not Allowed To Say Merry Chritsmas”!!

I recently discovered that the Indiana Historical Society of which I am a member is in the process of digitizing their photo library.   Here is one of the celebration at the Memorial Circle in Indianapolis at the end of World War 1. Click on the picture to see a larger view…. Continue reading Indiana History…

    Continue reading Happy Thanksgiving

One of my friends who is also a camera buff sent me some photos of antique cars on a Brown County street.  I kind of antiqued this one and it now resides on my desktop. Thanks Max….. Click on the pic if you want to see a larger version…. Continue reading Old Time Brown County

I don’t know which GOP rally the picture to the right was from but I know it was from one of them. This guy is seen to represent the supposed base of the GOP. (Why do all those guys holding signs like this one look the same?) They seem to be deathly afraid of someone, anyone, getting something they don’t deserve.  In that regard they just seem to hate the refugees almost as much as ISIS. When I say “supposed base” it is not without an underlying feeling. Outside of Fox News I don’t see much of the phobia happening. … Continue reading About Those Refugees…

I have been digging pretty deeply into my photo archives lately and ran across this Maui Sunset taken in April 1986 while I was on my honeymoon. Continue reading Maui Sunset

I embrace change, it is what keeps life interesting and challenging for me.  To that end I am adding yet another subcategory to RJsCorner. It is called “Streaks Of Inspiration” and is found under the”About Life” category header above. I am approaching almost 3,000 posts here. Most are about my observations of daily life around this planet earth. But then there are some where an idea hit me almost like a streak of lighting. It suddenly appeared in my consciousness, often when I am in the show and allow myself to fully contemplate life. :) Many of the posts that … Continue reading Streaks Of Inspiration…

Religion today seems more about interfaith competition than “love your neighbor”. It seems to be “love your neighbor as long as he is a Lutheran/Baptist/etc.   Spiritual but not Religious The above words (I failed to capture the source) and the graphic are perhaps the primary reasons I now claim to be “spiritual but not religious”. I just see too much politics and interfaith competition to make me want to stay part of any particular religious organization of today.  Each religion and each religious denomination seems to be at battle with everyone else for the mantle of God’s people. I … Continue reading About Religion…

I don’t know how many of you are like me but I just don’t buy into the latest gourmet trends of chefs stacking all my food on top of each other on my plate. It tends to taint the meal before I even start eating.  I end up spend minutes getting the mashed potatoes out of my asparagus and the entrée cleaned off before I can get my initial taste.  It just starts the meal out on the wrong foot for me.  To try to eliminate that added task I have made up the following card that I will insist … Continue reading Deserving Its Own Real Estate…