On a road trip with daughter Molly. She too is a history buff. When we went to Richmond on Oct. 14, I was most eager to drive down fabled Monument Avenue, where a new history is overtaking a former one. For more than a century, Monument Avenue was famous for a parade of mounted Confederate leaders, … Continue reading Four New Views of Robert E. Lee: History Comes to Richmond
The much-ballyhooed Sept. 18 rally in support of the January 6 Capitol invasion was largely ignored by much U. S. Media Saturday afternoon. By midafternoon, the Drudge Report still featured it, but Fox News was fixated on refugees crossing the Texas border. Other networks were also ignoring the rally. But The Independent, a major UK … Continue reading Capitol Pro-Insurrection rally: An Independent View
A substantial Holiday Weekend Read: I always feel uneasy when finding myself in agreement with rightwing Catholic pundit Ross Douthat. But in his August 31 NYTimes column, he nails it, mocking the spectacle of : ” . . . generals and grand strategists who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out across the television … Continue reading A Quaker Theologian for Our Hard Times.
Eleven years ago, I was nearing the end of my time as Director of Quaker House, the Friends peace project in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. Our newsletter for that summer devoted most of its front page to Afghanistan, and the seemingly “invisible/forever” war there. That war is no longer invisible, and at least the … Continue reading Deja Vu All Over Again: A Glimpse of Afghanistan in 2010
It was the headline that caught me: “Shocking and Ominous Talk,” it blared. Really? Such language was rare in the Selma Times Journal (STJ), but I found it there, on the editorial page of the New Year’s Day edition, for January 1, 1965. The Alabama headline shone up at me from a cloudy gray background, … Continue reading Back to my Future: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Wherever, Forever . . .