In the first Episode of HBO’s “White Lotus”, an uber rich family is vacationing at an uber-fancy Hawaiian hotel. The mom comes into where her daughter and friend are smoking pot. As they quickly put their gear away, the mom asks, “Is there something burning?” To this her teenage daughter replies, “We were just doing some witchcraft.” Her mom shrugs and shuts the door saying to herself, “At least it’s not pot.” Continue reading
At Least it Isn’t Pot
Posted in LCMS 2007 Convention, Missouri Megatrends
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50 Years Later and We’re Still at War with the Unborn
Don’t you cringe when women, usually in their mid-20s, express such righteous indignation at the Supreme Court could taking away a right they have had for 50, count ‘em, 50 years. I suppose anything twice as old as you seems really old. But using their dates and logic, slave-holding was a right people in the United States had for hundreds and hundreds of years. An entire nation’s peace was shattered to overturn that right. Continue reading
Posted in Families
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How to Change Your Mind….And Lose Your Soul
STOP! Read no further if you’re an integrationists (someone who seeks to combine the Bible with secular psychological theories), an All-Truth-is-God’s-Truth person, or you think the Holy Spirit leads by current trends in society. Also to be warned are those under the care of a counselor of any stripe be that Biblical, psychological, or psychiatric. If you’re any of these, you’ll be offended. Save yourself the heart or headache. I have no bona fides that testify to my authority on this subject. The one thing I know for sure is that I’m afraid of this new, new class of drugs and the new ones first proscribed in the 90s’. The SSRIs. The old-school antidepressant which basically tranquilled, not so much. It was well-understood how they worked and what they did. These new, new and new ones, they are approved by side effects. What became Prozac was first investigated as an antihistamine, and what became Viagra was first used to treat hypertension and angina. Continue reading
Posted in For Anyone who dares, Missouri Megatrends
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On Being Sane In Insane Places
All you need to know to be induced to read this lengthy 1973 article is this: “Eight sane people gained secret admission to 12 different hospitals. Their diagnostic experiences constitute the data of the first part of this article; the remainder is devoted to a description of their experiences in psychiatric institutions” (p. 2 below). This experiment is 50 years old, and nothing, as far as I know, has changed. I publish it here so that it might be kept in collective memory that there have always been some challenging the weight, the legitimacy, the helpfulness of the ‘science’ of psychology and psychiatry. Continue reading
Posted in For Anyone who dares, Missouri Megatrends
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Me and My Arrows Second Addition
The second, more price friendly, edition will be available at Lulu any day now. My thanks to you if you brought the first edition at its steep price. That was because I didn’t know how to manage costs on Lulu. I still don’t, but I had the expertise of one who did. Go to Lulu.com and search for Me and My Arrows.
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Nothing is Everything – Visit to Grace Covenant, Austin, Texas
“Nothing is everything” might ring a bell from the Skyrizi commercial. It’s a prescription drug to treat moderate to severe plaque psoriasis.[1] Drug-naming, really branding is more accurate, is a multimillion-dollar industry especially since the advent of “ask your doctor if ___ is right for you” took over the airways which is only legal in the U.S. and New Zealand. Ask your doctor why. Nondenominational churches share the branding problem with drug companies. Continue reading
Posted in Contemporary Worship, Missouri Megatrends
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500th Post
I ended up preaching about 2,800 sermons, and they are longer than your average blog post. This is the 500th blog post. I was goaded to start this blog in 2007. A member came back from the Lutheran Church Misery Synod’s national convention saying that my voice has got to be heard. Another member, about that same time, said that he wanted to know what I thought about synodical issues more than any other pastor. So it being hard to kick against goads, I started posting. Continue reading
Posted in Families, Missouri Megatrends
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Bible Translations “Visually” Compared
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Is it Not Kicking the Dog or is it Rising Above Them?
This blog was written years ago just after the Covid dust began to settle. Now, 2024, I’m reading King Cholera, a 1966 “biography” of the disease that consumed England beginning in the early 1830s and lasted to the 1860s. O how I wish I had read this prior to Covid. The exact same sides, arguments, accusations, conspiracies, and vilifying of positions was done then, and I now suspect is done in every pandemic, plague, or epidemic. Continue reading
Posted in For Anyone who dares, For Pastors Only
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Draft Our Daugthers
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