We’ll soon be hearing more and more about the Civil War. Or, as it is sometimes called, the “Great Rebellion,” the “War of Northern Aggression” — in some places, it is still simply called “the War.” That’s because we’re soon to begin commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities. Some of us remember the centennial of the war. I do.
The American culture has a tendency to gravitate towards charismatic personalities. For all of the foundational principles of the separation of powers in the U.S. government, we have a bad habit of essentially handing over power to one party and then scratching our collective head when things go wrong. The same, unfortunately, is true in churches. The problem is the problem of monoculture.
We’ve entered the time of year when things are different from how they look. As the skies and the woods and the yards turn to gray and brown, the things that stimulate our other senses grow stronger.
That’s especially so out here in the country.
The media are setting us up. This is nothing new; they have basically carried water for the Democratic Party for at least 50 years and that habit shows no signs of abating. Have you noticed that they've been telling us for a year that the Dems are going to be shelled in this election? There is more to that prediction than meets the eye.
It was five years ago, riding back on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River from Ashland, Kentucky, that I noticed it. We had been at the dedication of a memorial to Jack Kerouac at the Paramount Theatre there. What was stunning about the trip home was the festoonery. Every house, it seemed, had some elaborate Halloween decoration. Even fairly woebegone trailers could be counted on to have out front a 20-foot-high Frankenstein’s monster, well lit and kept inflated by a powerful fan.
It may be that all of us have “hot buttons” – things we sometimes hear other people say that irritate us or even enrage us. A hot button for professors of religion (or at least for me) is to hear someone juxtapose the word “Christian” and the word “Catholic.”
Elections come and go. And as those cycles occur, various big ideas also have a tendency to move from their fifteen minutes of fame into the dust bin of old ideas, left there to rot without ever delivering their promised benefits. Health Savings Accounts is one such idea that, unfortunately, has mostly been relegated to that political purgatory.
Shortly after I moved here I received one of those documents that make the e-mail rounds. It was based on the then-popular “you might be a redneck” comedy act, only each stanza of this one ended with “you might live in Ohio.”
The concept of an “app store” in which normal, everyday people easily download applications for their devices vaulted to the public consciousness two and a half years ago with Apple’s iPhone App Store. The store shook up the way people view and use mobile phones. The Mac App Store announced on Wednesday appears poised to be just as big of a seismic shift. This is not an attempt to simply make a little revenue on Mac software sales; it is Apple’s plan to translate iPhone and iPad momentum into a full-fledged attack on Microsoft’s Windows stronghold.
It’s election year, which means that the national media are dusting off their maps and trying once again to figure out exactly where Ohio is. You will note that I said “media are,” not “media is.” That’s because I’m a member of a secret organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered portions of the language. “Media” is plural — the singular is “medium” (as in “The Athens News is an unparalleled advertising medium.”) Likewise the word “data.” If someone says “that data is not available,” he or she may know whether or not those data are available, but he or she is illiterate.