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2018: The Year In Pictures
As some of you know, I enjoy taking pictures – and then finding something to say.
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Sisters: A Christmas Story
Listen to “Sisters: A Christmas Story” by Fred Smith I’ve been reading this week about the disaster of Sumner Redstone’s family. While Sumner built great business ventures in CBS and Viacom, his personal life and that of his entire family is a tale filled with betrayals of trust, conflicts of interest, lawsuits against each other, theft, shady ethics, deceit and greed that steadily consumed them. It is a dismal story played out in families from the beginning of time. It’s not Cain’s spontaneous and raging murder of his brother, Abel. It is the slow and measured killing of love over time. It is the story of sisters Rachel and…
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Leah and Rachel
Weddings are typically beautiful events with the music, candles, glamorous bride and handsome groom. Receptions, especially those with jumbo cold boiled shrimp, are festive and seeing the happy couple off to Maui just completes the picture. That does not describe this wedding. In fact, had there been the ritual invitation for someone to stand up and object, this would have been the time. Certainly, it was love at first sight for Jacob and Rachel. “When Jacob saw Rachel daughter of Laban, his mother’s brother, and Laban’s sheep, he went over and rolled the stone away from the mouth of the well and watered his uncle’s sheep. Then Jacob kissed Rachel and…
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Haters
Listen to “Haters” By Fred Smith Facebook is not the place for subtlety and we all know that. Yet, this week I posted a spoof from the Babylon Bee and several good friends took it seriously. I know I should file disclaimers, but I don’t. It was the one telling us that scores of Trump supporters were abandoning him because he preferred McDonald’s over Chick-fil-A. I thought it was funny and said more about the fickleness of supporters than the animus of his detractors. However, one of my friends made a comment about evangelicals who are “Trump haters” and ignore the fact that God has used imperfect leaders and…
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Jacob’s Dream At Bethel
We hear so much talk about transitions today. People are in transition from careers to retirement. The balance of power in the world is shifting from West to East. The economy is in transition from making things to knowledge and accumulating data for sale. Religion is in transition from believers to nones. Education is in transition from campus-based to online. Brick and mortar is over and everything about physical place has moved to the web. Well, Jacob was in transition from the certain world of home in Beersheba to the uncertain world of a strange place he had never been and a family he had never known. As well, he was…
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Place and Power
Listen to “Place and Power” by Fred Smith If you want well-written insight into the work of speechwriters and their behind-the-scenes influence, I would suggest Barton Swaim’s book, “The Speechwriter.” Its soul-searching honesty about the conflicts, challenges and moments of both praise and despair are good reading. Some of our finest pundits, commentators, and authors have served as speechwriters. I am thinking of Michael Gerson (for George W. Bush), Peggy Noonan (for Ronald Reagan), and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (for John F. Kennedy). Standing somewhere between press secretaries, diarists and fiction writers, they all wrestled with finding words for individuals who were often not, with some exceptions, gifted with language.…
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Jacob and Esau
Stories about our origins are always stories about ourselves and our unique characteristics. Most tend to highlight the good and play down the flaws. We airbrush history and our forefathers. You really have to dig around in the history books to read about the darker sides of Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Lincoln. It is almost impossible to find any stories about Washington that make him fully human. He is a complete enigma even to those who knew him well. “Adams fumed in his diary, Franklin sparkled in his anecdotes, Jefferson agonized in his treatises, and Hamilton bristled with passion in his letters. Washington resisted any urge he may have had…
