Originally published on August 19th, 2018 in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. Dear Son (or Daughter): The summer of 1974 was a pivotal moment in American history. The United States was one year away from exiting Vietnam. Watergate was coming to a close. For the first time in American history, a...
North Platte, Nebraska, is the middle of nowhere. Actually, it exists in what I believe to be a beautiful part of our country, western Nebraska. Most people travel through North Platte on their way to Denver, Omaha, or Kansas City. In their haste to get to their destination, travelers...
The Clery Act requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs to keep and disclose information about crime on and near their respective campuses. Compliance is annually monitored by the United States Department of Education. I will be the first to point out the overreach by...
One of the readers of my blog referred me to Patrick J. Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed. He told me that it would be a difficult read, but that I needed to read it. He was right. It is a difficult read, and the other readers of this blog will...
I like to drive. Even more specifically, I like to drive my car without the radio on. In what I know is a sure sign of some shortcoming, I even pay for a Sirius satellite subscription—which I rarely use. When I was a much younger man attending theological seminary in...
On April 5, 1968, I was getting ready for school when my mother came down the stairs to tell me that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. We received this news the morning after he had been killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. There...
Our children are breathing toxic air. I’m not talking about air from pollution. I am talking about cultural oxygen. Peggy Noonan, one of the most thoughtful public intellectuals in our society today, makes precisely this point when she notes that “…a nation has an atmosphere. It has air it breathes...
Some of my readers will remember the series Mad Men. Mad Men is a fictitious story about a New York advertising agency set in the early 1960s. Don Draper, the lead, is a successful professional, husband, father—and womanizer. Nearly every other male in the series either harasses or preys on...
I played baseball when I was young, and was a member of a team that won a citywide championship. I still have the trophy from that year, the caption of which reads: “League and Tourney Champs: F.A.C Bucks 1971”. I suppose I saved the trophy after all these years because...
Based on our data, only 16% of my blog readers live in the Dubuque community. That means my Editorial below, published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on Sunday, December 17th, 2017, will probably mean nothing to you. But before you exit the page and go on with your day, I’d...
