Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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I’m a creature of habit, but I’m also fairly flexible so I can address things on short notice. Otherwise, when some of my routines get disrupted, the consequences can be extensive. For example, I usually charge my cellphone overnight, every night, on my nightstand. Recently, on a Saturday night, I left the phone on the arm of my living room chair. I knew before I went to be I should get it, but I didn’t follow through on that. Sunday morning, I put the phone on charge with plenty of time for it to fully charge before time to leave for churc...
There comes a point in every child’s life when he or she first learns of the sin of slavery in America. While it’s a jolt to all children, those of us who are not African American can only imagine the dismay felt by young Black children when they first learn that their ancestors were dehumanized under the U.S. Constitution and state laws. That’s what makes Black History Month so important, and unique. We are a melting pot of diversity, a nation with a history of wrongs and rights, but it should go without saying that one of the greatest wrong...
I've been watching bits and pieces of former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial, and it is plain to me that partisanship is overwhelming reason and any semblance of jurisprudence. The trial will be over before this column is published. If it were a criminal case, not just a decision on whether Trump will be allowed to run for office again, I would be impressed with the Democrats' prosecution and their appeals to the emotions of the jury, who also happen to be the victims of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol at the center of Trump's i...
It was only a matter of time before Cicero got canceled. The New York Times the other day profiled Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who wants to destroy the study of classics as a blow for racial justice. The critique of classics as stultifying and privileged isn’t new, but in the woke era this attack is more potent than ever and has a better chance of demolishing a foundation of Western education. At a time when Abraham Lincoln doesn’t pass muster in the progressive precincts of America, poor benighted Homer, whose chief subject wa...
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” (Psalm 51:1) This is the first line of King David’s confession of sin after the Bathsheba incident. I’ve mentioned previously that the basis of his hope is the steadfast love of God (as opposed to anything in himself). Now, though, take a look at that last phrase: blot out my transgressions. The Hebrew word there for blotting out is the one you would use for wiping somethi...
The New Mexico Supreme Court ordered jury trials to resume on Feb. 1, following their suspension because of increasing numbers of COVID-19 cases statewide and potential for further cases after end-of-year holidays. Recognizing public concerns about the coronavirus, all courts have implemented carefully considered, successful measures to protect jurors and trial participants. New Mexicans who reported for jury service during the pandemic overwhelmingly have indicated they felt safe while performing their civic duty. Jury trials serve as a...
There is widespread despair over the impact of remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, likely because kids do learn better in close quarters. Not all educators agree that isolation is a critical factor. One of those is Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator. Christakis reminded us in a December Atlantic article that American public schools weren’t doing such a great job before the pandemic. Christakis says that’s because remote learning is actually worsening things that make current classroom learning ineffective now. The cla...
It’s not right. It’s not fair. And, on top of all that, President Biden’s executive order allowing transgender males to compete against girls is going to destroy girls sports in America. Almost every one of Biden’s many executive orders to date is going to be harmful in some way to our security, our battered economy, or both. Closing the Keystone Pipeline, stopping construction of the border wall and raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour are a few of his terrible mistakes that come to mind. But the worst order Biden signed was the...
I suspect most people know a friend or family member who’s contracted COVID-19. I was visiting with a very devout, elderly couple at church that recently who had it. At one point, the lady said she didn’t know how they got it because they were diligent in protecting themselves and others, not that she was blaming God or thought she was being disciplined for some sin (Hebrews 12:4-13), which many people do when bad things happen. Anyway, I responded it likely wasn’t because of anything they did or didn’t do, but somehow God would bring about s...
There’s a gold rush going on in the financial markets. It features everyday underdogs getting their due and bigwig “bad guys” recoiling from their comeuppance. It’s accompanied by online flame wars and some of the dumbest displays of dominance in the animal kingdom. In short, it’s an American phenomenon. And it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. But it’s not new. And it’s not necessarily a problem. At the center of things has been GameStop, a 25-year-old company with a washed-up retailing strategy. It sells video game equipment and t...
The reason-defying rise of video game retailer GameStop’s stock price seems to combine the psychology of the “housing bubble” of the 2000s and the populism that gave us four years with Donald Trump at our nation’s helm. GameStop looks like a struggling giant when seen through the usual Wall Street lenses of financial performance, annual reports and quarterly conference calls with investment analysts. It’s a $9-billion corporation with 6,000 stores. To gamers of a certain age — that is, millennials and those who are entering adulthood after them...
Joe Biden’s 60-day moratorium on oil and gas leases and permits on federal lands puts him on track to take jobs and money from New Mexico at a time of crisis. There is no gray area in New Mexico for wanting to protect the environment and wanting the benefits of a world with energy. By banning oil and gas leases on federal lands, Biden is not uniting. He is effectively promoting the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars per year if he decides to continue with shutting down the oil and gas industry in New Mexico after his 60-day plan. Many N...
Find a way to remember this time. It’s historically unusual. In the span of five short years, we’ve witnessed the beginning of a brand new religious movement, its meteoric rise to national prominence, and it’s abrupt flame-out. Of course, I’m talking about the conspiracy theory called QAnon. Despite some protest to the contrary, QAnon is an undeniably religious phenomenon. Embarrassingly, its ranks were swelled with Evangelical Christians, who would never knowingly adopt a different faith,...
Joe Biden wants to turn the page on Donald Trump. But on Day One, he began copying his methods. In fact, Barack Obama’s administration (Joe Biden, vice president) did exactly what Trump was criticized for doing, before many thought of the latter as a serious candidate. Remember the “national security” implications of importing Canadian aluminum or French wines? Trump was rightly criticized for abusing the language of a 1960s law to do what he wanted. He used executive orders, on the flimsiest of excuses, to raise tariffs without regard for C...
I almost got a lump in my throat (not really) to see things return to normal 24 hours after President Joseph Biden took the oath of office. With COVID-19 preventing the parties and parades that usually occupy a new president’s first day, Biden instead marched resolutely to the Resolute Desk and signed 17 executive orders, the most significant of which undid many of former President Donald Trump’s most controversial directives. He undid Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. from some Muslim-majority nations and Trump’s release of many square...
Everyone agreed the inauguration ceremony was nice. Lady Gaga was Lady Gaga. Garth Brooks was Garth Brooks. Everyone also agreed President Joe Biden’s speech was nice. Nothing plagiarized. Nothing too fancy. Nothing that presidential historians will be quoting a month from now. Biden’s call for national unity and political healing was widely praised by Democrats, the mainstream Democrat media and even some easily impressed Republicans. But what did our new unifier-in-chief do as soon as he got control of the presidential pen? Keeping his cam...
For a year, we haven’t seen anything like the peace on earth mentioned at Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:14). While each political party blames the other for problems, we’re learning much of the destruction was likely caused by anarchists because they want to live without rules. They’ve infiltrated peaceful public gatherings of both political parties to wreak havoc after the patriotic attendees departed. Patriots love and zealously but legally support their homeland, in this case, the United States of America, including our governmental system, whoever...
Failure to wear masks can do more than spread COVID-19, as some of the intruders who stormed the U.S. Capitol last week are finding. It also reveals faces to security cameras, government investigators and online private eyes, who’ve used those bare visages and other telling clues to identify many of the miscreants. As a result, not only have many of them been hit with criminal charges, but several were summarily fired from their jobs. As a group, the mob inside the Capitol certainly was breaking the law in the most serious of ways, a...
We’ve had the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6. Washington now hosts more U.S. troops than global hot spots to defend against threats related to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. And now, only now, the time has come to pile on the president. Suddenly, Congress and the media cannot find enough ways to mount retribution against President Donald Trump. Neither, so it seems, can corporate America. I don’t feel sorry for the president. I have been wanting him relieved of office since it became plain that with arguably less knowledge of th...
Donald Trump was the president of Twitter. What radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and TV was to Ronald Reagan, communicating 280 characters at a time on a social media platform that is a watchword for hyperactive inanity was to President Trump. It is symbolically appropriate that the effective end of his power after the siege of the U.S. Capitol has coincided with the suspension of his Twitter account. He was impeached a second time on Wednesday, but the punishment that really stings is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey deciding after sitting down w...
Living in fear of what evil men may do is just as idolatrous as falling down in front of a statue. So what does it say about us when our churches are filled with fearful people? It says we’re not being very honest about our faith. To claim faith in Christ, and then live in fear of something else, indicates that our true object of worship may be other than what we confess on a Sunday morning. If this is confusing, it may help to remember that the word “fear” often appears in our Bibles as a syn...
Dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists in Hong Kong were rounded up around dawn last Wednesday as the U.S. Congress was preparing for a contentious fight over the Electoral College vote — a fight that would soon prompt a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters to storm the United States Capitol. The timing of the arrests was not coincidental. While our nation has been mired in political gridlock and dysfunction, authoritarians around the world have gleefully exploited the absence of American leadership as an opportunity to run rou...
I had a column written about President Donald Trump’s second impeachable phone call, this time to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Then Jan. 6 happened. That’s when organized democracy prevailed after a delusional mob, presumptuously assuming they represented a majority, which they did not, was thwarted in an attempt to force their will on Congress. Congress then acted to officially validate the will of both the voters and the electors by certifying the election victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice Presi...
Wednesday was a sad day for America. We watched the mob violence and lawlessness in Washington with a tear in our eye. We saw images of the Capitol stormed by hundreds of yahoos who fought with police, broke windows and forced the evacuation of a session of the U.S. Congress. At least five died in the chaos. Wednesday was also a very sad day for conservatives, the Republican Party and tens of millions of American citizens who voted to re-elect President Trump for all the right reasons. But it was a really terrible day for Donald Trump. The...
On Dec. 20, our preacher spoke about “wonderful” as it’s related to Jesus based on Isaiah 9:6, including that Jesus’ birth was wonderful in his because of the simple location, which we presume to be a stable and not a corral (sheepfold), where there also would be a manger with hay. I then wondered: Why, actually, was Jesus born in a stable or possibly even a sheepfold? The easy answer is, “Because there was no room in the inn (Luke 2:1-7).” The inn wasn’t what we call a hotel; it was likely an upper room in one of Joseph’s Bethlehem relat...