Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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All year long in her cell in Texas, Lisa Montgomery crochets angels and Christmas tree ornaments and elaborate nativity scenes overrun with more angels. On Christmas Eve, her attorneys called her to say that a judge in Washington, D.C., had ruled that a new execution date for her couldn’t even be scheduled until Jan. 1 at the earliest. Then, she’d have to be given the legally required 20 days notice of that new date, according to the ruling from D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss. It wasn’t clear how much of this Montgomery really under...
This week, we gleefully put behind us a year of closings, cancellations and isolation, and enter a year that gives us hope that at least some social life will return as we chip away at the COVID-19 pandemic. I have tried to make the best of a year spent mostly at home with my wife, our cat and my trusty desktop computer. The computer hosted just about all of my work and leisure life in 2020. I got pretty good at Zoom, interacting with images of others trapped in offices or living rooms, and my work has consisted mostly of covering meetings I...
What a difference a terrible year makes. Last year at this time, my wife, Colleen the travel agent, and I were getting ready to take 40 of her clients on a 15-day cruise out of Dubai to India and back. This year, thanks to the COVID-19 virus and the strict lockdowns imposed to fight it, the world’s travel industry barely exists and Colleen and I will be spending January under house arrest. Unfortunately, house arrest has become the new normal for 40 million Californians. We’ve been locked down, masked up and ordered to stay in our basements for...
What do Christians mean when we say that humans are created in the image of God? Ask 10 theologians and you'll get 11 different answers. What does “the image of God” mean in our lives? It can't have anything to do with our physical appearance, since the Bible reveals God as an invisible spirit, without body, parts, or passions, as our Presbyterian friends say. Other things are proposed though, that supposedly separate humanity from the lower animals and reflect something of our divine origin. Is...
More than 5,000 years ago, the warriors of Babylonia painted their fingernails with kohl to go to battle. More recently, A-list actor Brad Pitt wore nail polish, apparently just for the heck of it. Yet for some reason, it’s a showstopper when a 17-year-old male in Texas wears nail polish to school? Granted, women have been practically the only ones decorating their nails for the last few centuries. But custom and convention are no reason for nail polish to be an exclusively female style — witness how earrings have become commonplace for men...
For what it’s worth, here are my public affairs resolutions for 2021: I will take the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as I can get it. I will continue to wear masks as much as possible in public, wash hands and maintain distance as long as is necessary, which is likely to be long after the shots. I will continue to treat the pandemic the same as I would an invasion by a foreign power Would COVID-deniers stand on London streets defending their rights during the Nazi bombing in World War II? I don’t think so. How can they see mounting death rates, ove...
Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even worse thing to manufacture. Although President-elect Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach, in order to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense. In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, Biden declared climate change a crisis requiring a “unified national response.” Going even further, he called it “an exi...
Most Americans would agree this has been one of the most, if not THE most stressful year for our country and possibly the entire world. The ongoing political strife worsened this year due to the presidential and congressional elections, which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 restrictions that have been in place for about nine months also have kept us from joyfully celebrating any holiday since Valentine’s Day. Have you realized if Jesus actually was born on Dec. 25, Mary’s travail of pregnancy occurred in the same tim...
Yes, we’re all tired. Tired of the isolation, the restrictions, the lines, the shortages, the rude people and the ignorant ones who don’t understand safety practices, the cumbersome way we must operate, the dull routine and inability to socialize and travel. It shows in our state’s positive case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths. To make matters worse, Thanksgiving came along and people hit the apathy button and traveled against health officials’ recommendations. Add to that the good news of a vaccine arriving any time, which has lulled...
Merry Christmas. The year is almost over. President Trump will soon be free to watch right-wing TV and overload Twitter without the burden of responsibility. The best thing he will leave us with, however, is Operation Warp Speed, which just might make the COVID-19 pandemic manageable without economic shutdowns by the end of 2021. The vaccines alone make 2021 worth looking forward to. The end, or at least the weakening, of COVID-19 will bring an economic explosion that has seldom been matched, I think. When the planet-size river of pent-up deman...
With a pandemic bearing down, Christmas is a bit subdued this year. That makes it a good year to curl up in bed with a Christmas book or plop down on your couch for a magical Christmas movie. I must admit I’ve read very few Christmas books, except as a young daddy. That’s when I delved into certain children’s classics such as “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” or one of the many Berenstain Bears’ holiday stories out there. Of the few Christmas-centric “chapter books” I remember reading, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” is undoubtedly my favo...
Hold on to your hats, Bible readers: There's a huge sense in which the physical boundaries of the biblical Promised Land are not important. Now, in one sense, they mattered greatly because they were the measure of God's faithfulness to his people, to his own promises. At a definite point in the history of Israel, they could see from the writings what God had said he would give them, and then look around at the boundaries of the land they were standing in, and say, “Yep. God did exactly what h...
Hunter Biden has told the world he’s just learned his “tax affairs” are under investigation by Delaware’s U.S. attorney. The burden is now on his father, President-elect Joe Biden, to ensure the nation that his attorney general and federal prosecutors will follow the evidence wherever it leads. First, to dispense with the pro-Trump conspiracy theories predictably choking the internet: No, there was no deep state plot to boost Biden by withholding potentially explosive information during campaign season. Rather, the Justice Department made go...
I used to think lawyers had to have above-average intelligence and more than their share of common sense. Now, I see an army of attorneys spouting mindless conspiracy theories and ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary as they file more than 50 doomed lawsuits in an attempt to overturn an election their client, President Donald Trump, lost fair and square last month. Lawyers have never had the reputation for operating ethically, although most attorneys I know do conduct their affairs with honor. The cynic in me, and I assume in...
I thought I was going to escape the madness of the L.A. Lockdown. I thought if I rented a small weekend getaway house in a rural part of the state two hours north, my family and I could eat outdoors at a restaurant again, or at least leave our basement without a note from our tyrannical governor. But I thought wrong. I didn’t count on Gavin Newsom’s latest lockdown edict. Two weeks ago life in empty and beautiful Santa Ynez Valley — where my father had his ranch and I’ve been visiting since 1974 — was about as normal and civilized as you could...
Those trying to revise our history and destroy America’s greatness were at it again at Thanksgiving. Some even promoted their anti-Christian agenda by calling the early European Americans “Christians” rather than using the traditional term “Pilgrims.” I don’t mean to imply the Pilgrims weren’t Christians; I’m just recognizing it seemed the history revisionists were broadening their negative claims against the Pilgrims to apply to all Christians by using the different terminology. All Christians make errors in judgment and even still sin, need...
After the killing of Iran’s top nuclear scientist last month, President-elect Joe Biden is coming under renewed pressure to quickly resume negotiations with the regime. He should slow down and proceed with caution. Biden has long since telegraphed his desire to resuscitate the nuclear deal that Iran agreed to with the U.S. and other world powers in 2015. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it was known, was designed to pause Tehran’s nuclear-development program well short of the weaponization stage. Since President Donald Trump’s decis...
One of President-elect Joe Biden’s top priorities should be determining what ignited the mania for President Donald Trump and keeps it aflame, then finding ways to address the unmet needs of the74 million people who voted in favor of a second Trump term. Biden should immediately begin to address their needs rather than merely stoke their suspicions as Trump has done for the past four years. It won’t be easy, and it will probably require years of replacing the mistrust that elected Trump in 2016 — and that Trump reignited at every oppor...
The state of California has felt like a minimum-security prison for eight months. In the name of fighting the pandemic and preventing our hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, the politicians and public health experts have told us “non-essential” Americans where we could go, where we could eat and where and how we could gather with our friends, strangers or fellow worshipers. They’ve slowly managed to outlaw any social activity and fun that brings ordinary people happiness. And now, thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti and something c...
The whole world waits for the certification of our presidential election. American Christians, even many I respect, are suspended in fear about who will be set over them. This is understandable for the world, but shameful for a believer. For us, it betrays a frightful failure to grasp the importance of the ascension of Jesus Christ to “the right hand of God.” Since we haven’t considered what that means, it becomes nothing more than a statement of abstract faith, with no real ability to save...
If you are one to dwell in the negative, this editorial challenge is not for you. But if you are one to look at, and reach for, the stars, who understands how very smart and talented so many of our fellow New Mexicans are, who recognizes the unique synergy of our military bases, national labs, research universities, private aerospace enterprises and one-of-a-kind purpose-built spaceport, New Mexico needs your voice. Because over the next month, it is essential we do everything possible to ensure those determining the new home of the new U.S....
I am writing this on Thanksgiving, when I shouldn’t be working on a column. But here I am, working on a column while I anticipate the annual feast. It’s going to be about being thankful. Gratitude is good for you and the people you thank. The usual thing columnists do on Thanksgiving is talk about what they’re thankful for. I’ll continue that tradition. In 2020, the year whose name denotes perfect vision, ours was dimmed by a world-wide pandemic. But those who read this column, whether I can count them on one hand or both, are alive, and, I...
We live in a time of heedless iconoclasm, and so one of the country’s oldest traditions is under assault. Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as, at best, based on falsehoods and, at worst, a whitewash of genocide against Native Americans. The New York Times ran a piece the other day titled, “The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year,” bristling with hostility toward the day of gratitude and noting that “the holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice.” (The paper is admirably consistent — a couple of y...
Because of the pandemic, this Thanksgiving will be different than most, but it will still include many familial and national traditions. The quiz below, from the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, provides an opportunity for you to test your knowledge of the Thanksgiving holiday in American history and culture. 1. What was the primary food that the Wampanoag, the Native American tribe that participated in the first Thanksgiving, contributed to the feast? A. Turkey B. Ham C. Venison D. Lobster 2. Writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, author...
The last time our election results were as fraught as they are today was in 1877, when a candidate who lost the popular vote in 1876 won the election quite literally by an act of Congress. Of the four candidates involved in the 1876 and 2020 races, three were honorable. It's sad to note that the exception is currently sitting in the White House with the apparent intent of occupying it in the same sense that Occupy Wall Street wanted to overturn the corporate world, without adequate popular support and, it seemed, by any means fair or foul. Acco...