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Blog Posts

Learning to Write

I’ve recently begun a book about writing.  Now and then I’ll include a brief excerpt from this work in progress as a blog post. These days, everybody is a writer.  Several billion of us connect daily through a variety of social media platforms and email programs.  For the first time in history, something you write today may, against all odds, go viral, filling your inbox with messages from faraway places such as Kazakhstan or Paraguay. Once a respected profession, writing ...

Miracle on the River Kwai

The classic movie starring Alec Guinness, The Bridge on the River Kwai, depicts life in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. This 1957 movie was fictional, but the more recent movie To End All Wars tells the true story of Ernest Gordon, a British Army captain captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of twenty-four. Gordon was sent to work on a railway line which the Japanese were building through the dense Thai jungle. For labor, ...

Word Play

Visitors to my Facebook page and website have proved that they love words. Here’s a test: Do you know what an eponym is? Homonyms are words with more than one meaning, such as rock, or fall. Synonyms mean nearly the same thing as another word, while antonyms mean the opposite. Acronyms combine the initial letters of a group of words to form a new word: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or laser (from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—sure, ...

Who Cares?

I’ve been watching an argument play out on news channels and the Internet. Bono, the Irish singer who leads the rock band U2, has been appearing on talk shows and podcasts, urging Americans to restore some of the foreign aid projects that have been canceled. This stirred up memories of my visits to faith-based clinics and hospitals around the world...

Lessons from an Owl

One day Carl Safina, an internationally celebrated conservationist and ecologist, came across a bedraggled baby owl near death, its feathers matted with fly eggs. He named the owlet Alfie and tenderly nursed it back to life. Over the next few years he kept a record of his efforts to help the young screech owl learn to fly, hunt, find a mate, and raise a family of offspring. The resulting book, Alfie and Me, strays into science, religion, and Greek and Indigenous philosophy, ...