Straight From The Hart

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. Samuel Adams

The year was 1983. The president was Ronald Reagan and he was addressing the Congress as he said, “When I took office in January 1981, I was appalled by what I found: American planes that couldn't fly and American ships that couldn't sail for lack of spare parts and trained personnel and insufficient fuel and ammunition for essential training. The inevitable result of all this was poor morale in our Armed Forces, difficulty in recruiting the brightest young Americans to wear the uniform, and difficulty in convincing our most experienced military personnel to stay on. There was a real question then about how well we could meet a crisis. We had to move immediately to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet -- and therefore help deter -- a crisis.” (Sound familiar?) Then he posed this question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retalia...

I was shocked and saddened to open up my newspaper recently and see that Lester Pannell had passed away. I didn’t know him well personally. He was a teacher in the Lebanon school system when I was a student but I wasn’t in any of his classes. I remember seeing him occasionally when he was in my husband’s barbershop years ago and recall especially his distinctive voice. But I learned to know about him through his newspaper columns on birding and it was what I discovered about him there that gave me great respect for him and made me feel like I knew him. He was a man of great passion. His passion was learning about and seeking out different birds. Now I care nothing about birds except that they are part of God’s beautiful creation. I barely know a turkey from a parakeet, but I always read Mr. Pannell’s column just for the experience of soaking up his passion for them. In the 2001 movie “Serendipity”, the character Dean says “The Greeks never wrote obituaries. When a man died, the...

It was just a normal school day in Lebanon.  I don’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime in the late 1950’s.  An office aide entered my classroom and I heard the teacher call my name, asking me to come to her desk.  She had a strange look on her face as she told me to go to the principal’s office with the aide. Never in all my years of school had I ever been sent to the principal’s office.   I was too scared to even wonder what I had done wrong as the office girl walked me down the hall. Once inside Mr. Rainey’s office, I saw a couple of people standing there including a strange man dressed in a dark suit.  I remember he looked rather ominous. He asked me my name and when I told him, he handed me a post card, asking me if I had ever seen it before.  I recognized it as a card I had sent a week or so before to The Daily Worker, the newspaper published at that time in New York City by the Communist Party USA, asking them to s...

On Palm Sunday of this year, a total of 55 Coptic Christians were murdered while worshipping in their churches, one  just outside Cairo, and another in Alexandria.  ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombings. While persecution of all  Christians has been a tactic of terrorism for ISIS, the Coptics (or Copts as they are usually referred to), have been terrorized and attacked even more frequently than many other groups.  The militants have previously claimed that attacks against Coptics are revenge for Muslim women persecuted by Coptic crusaders in Egypt. It is also believed that this particular Cathedral was attacked for the second time because it is the seat of the Coptic Pope, and the persona of Mark himself, author of the oldest of the four gospels.  Copts are among the oldest of all the continuous Christian faiths, if not the very oldest. Furthermore, experts who have studied  ISIS and other similar groups confirm that these groups “absolutel...

Another National Day of Prayer has come and gone.  I hope you took  time to reflect upon your own prayer life, as well as the corporate prayers of our nation.  There can be no argument that we have much to pray about in these days of violence and the threat of more war.  My own list grows longer each day. I was first introduced to the Day of Prayer sometime in the mid-1980s when I was asked to be the speaker at the observance in the National Cemetery in Springfield.  When I moved to Farmington sometime later to pastor a church, I participated in that city’s prayer observances.   Upon returning to Lebanon I began putting together an  early evening inter-denominational community service after people got off work on the National Day of Prayer.  It was held on the steps of the courthouse or in the lobby of the Civic Center where we brought in special singers and speakers or choirs from one of the schools.  We invited city and county offici...