“To be a historian”: Quote without comment

This from Doris Kearns Goodwin via Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” (with thanks to Don Haymes for passing it on to me):  To be a historian is to discover the facts in context, to discover what things mean, to lay before the reader your reconstruction of time, place, mood, to empathize even when you disagree. You read [...]

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Dictionaries and Lexicons

DICTIONARIES AND LEXICONS. None understand the value of dictionaries and lexicons so well as those who use them most. Every individual who reads any should, when reading, always keep by him an English Dictionary, such as Walker’s or Webster’s. An English word, the defination [sic] or meaning of which we are ignorant of, might as [...]

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Two Disciples websites, and a reflection on archiving

DisciplesWorld‘s website will change and evolve over the next few months.  Keep up with it all at Verity Jones’ blog here and get connected at the Intersection, a social networking site for Disciples and friends, here.  Change and evolution is the order of the day it seems. It remains to be seen what an archive [...]

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CEW Dorris on Cled Wallace’s War Baby

This from CEW Dorris, Nashville, TN to Cled Wallace, Austin TX, September 9, 1942: Dear Brother Wallace: I have viewed your war baby which was displayed in the June issue of the Bible Banner and I must say that its one of the ugliest looking youngsters that I ever saw to have such a good [...]

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Looking Back: Of Disclaimers and Critical Thinking

Installment 3 (see the two prior posts below) is from the 21 June 2005 edition of Occasional Espistles of Grace and Peace and is entitled Of Disclaimers and Critical Thinking. Given my profession I regularly surf church, parachurch, biblical studies and other like ministry websites. Invariably I run across disclaimers, usually on the links pages, that [...]

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Looking Back: Follow the Truth

Installment 2 of my trio (read yesterday’s post below for the set-up) is also from the 20 June 2005 edition of Occasional Episltes of Grace and Peace.  The title is Follow the Truth: …wherever it may lead” read the sign on the Music City Assembly of God…not bad for a marquee one-liner. I snapped a [...]

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Looking Back on Blogging: A Trio Worth Re-reading

I began blogging in June 2005 at blogspot and continued there through August 2008.  Before that I maintained a faculty web page on the Ezell-Harding site for over two years.  That page was obviously academic in nature (my Biblical and Theological Studies links page is the residue of that old page).  My vocation, as I see it, has changed little in these [...]

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Writing well, thinking well and telling the stories

When teaching at Ezell-Harding, I assigned research papers and often used essay questions on tests.  Writing well leads to thinking well, I told my students.  Before you can write you must first think, I stressed.  Though a few papers and tests each semester clearly demonstrated that the students hadn’t communicated anything in their writing (one can only imagine their [...]

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