I’m going on an Eastern Europe cruise in late May, which goes to some places I don’t know much about. So my question to all you international types out there is, is there anything in the following cities that a person really, really doesn’t want to miss?

Dublin, Ireland
Barrow, England
Rosyth (Edinburgh), Scotland
Copenhagen, Denmark
Helsinki, Finland
Talinn, Estonia
St. Petersburg, […]

As Greg and I sped along a rural highway on the way to a meeting yesterday, we had another amazing animal sighting. Unfortunately, this one was deceased. But we’re thinking it still counts.
The scenery had turned hilly, and I was in the middle of saying something really important (can’t remember what now). So it’s all […]

I usually don’t go off-topic in this particular direction, but last night’s episode of “Lost” is another head-scratcher.
(BTW, if you don’t do Lost, the following won’t make any sense to you. But if you think you’d ever like to find out what all the fuss is about, do what Greg and I did — rent […]

Post-apocalyptic piano bar?

Nope, it’s the lobby of a long-abandoned hotel in Detroit, beautifully photographed by two French photographers as part of a haunting collection called “Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.” You can see it HERE.
Are ruins ever beautiful? The answer, I think, is yes. There’s something appalling, to be sure, in seeing something that was […]

Greg accuses me of ‘going meta’ at the drop of a hat. He can do a pretty good imitation of me noticing a new flavor of ice cream and turning it into a case against postmodernism. He’s probably right that I get a little loony sometimes, judging from the fact that a bit of gardening […]

If you don’t get out in the blogosphere much anymore, you might be missing it, but there’s a bit of a hullabulloo going on about a new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) came out. The numbers aren’t good for any Christian, but they’re probably the most depressing for Evangelicals. For instance(*):
Since 1990, the last time […]

I just input a new quote to show up on the “A Word” column at right. But that section has a very limited word count, and so sometimes I have to cut off a lot of good stuff. That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to do to one of the luminaries of the […]

When I opined back here that I had been a little disappointed with “The Brothers Karamazov,” Father Luke Hartung commented that I might prefer the writings of Alexandros Papadiamandis, who has been called “The Greek Dostoyevsky.” Father Luke also volunteered to send me a collection of Papadiamandis’ short stories called “The Boundless Garden” if I […]

Mimi’s recipe for bean soup HERE reminds me that Greg and I came across one that we wanted to pass along on The Pioneer Woman’s site. Greg knows more about this blog than I do, but if this post is any indication, she is (a) funny, (b) a good photographer and (c) someone who knows […]

This is an update to the last post. I was a little too flip, and I wanted to be clear about stem cell research. There IS promise in stem cell research, but there’s also a GOOD alternative to destroying embryos.

Couple things from this list of the media-reported myths about stem cell research, just to help […]