With a wry smile the young Duke seminarian greeted worshipers with the words, “Santa Claus has left the mall” during a meeting of members of the North American Baptist Fellowship, a regional group of the Baptist World Alliance.     Though the tinsel of Christmas season is back in boxes and tucked into the attic and all the trappings of t...

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In my first job as a reporter I worked on a special economics issue for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. I was assigned most of the stories that related to home and commercial real estate. After learning what I could about each source’s subject of expertise and their prognostications for the area’s real estate market in 1977, I asked each for a single word of advice to readers. Without e...

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  Taking advantage of a warm spring day in late December, I hiked a couple hours this weekend with my wife in Umstead State Park, one of the Raleigh area’s real recreational treasures. Near the end of our two-hour hike we encountered many late risers coming toward us who were just getting started on the trail. Two dads struggled to corral four boys who jumped around like fire off sparkl...

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The only public event invocation I remember is when the prayer at a football game asked God to comfort the opponent in their pending defeat. Such public prayers are more symbol than substance, but symbols seem to count in our hyper-sensitive atmosphere. Now the invocation at Barrack Obama’s inaugural has become a political symbol because the man Obama asked to lead it is an outspoken opponent o...

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    The clatter of boots on cement and the metallic crack of drawn weapons may not ring with the poetic beauty of “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream,” but the result is still frightened people fleeing for safety.     In the first case, a virtual army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided a meat packing plant, scattering hundreds of Sp...

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