Truth vs. “My Truth”

Whenever I hear someone speak or write in terms of “my truth” or “your truth,” I immediately recognize that truth is not their thing. Opinion is. Truth is simply there. It is not owned by me or by you. We either submit to truth, or we delude ourselves into imagining that whatever opinion or preference […]

Questions are our most potent intellectual tool. They are the most significant arrows in our intellectual quiver. How questions are framed really matter. Change just a few words, modify the syntax, and you could get a very different answer. I credit Gordon Allport for this pithy story to illustrate this: Two Catholic Priests were engaged […]

Although I’ve never met her in person, I’ve gotten acquainted with a relatively young lady – quite a bit younger than myself – through social media. An artist by profession, she is extraordinarily talented at drawing and painting. I’ve literally been mesmerized by some of her work, and I’ve told her I plan to one […]

A news item caught my eye this week. The incident in question took place on July 10th of this year; I’m writing about it now because an arrest took place just this week following an anonymous tip. Back in July, a man by the name of Marc Cohen, age 63, was taking his wife out […]

Fundamentally, I am a teacher. That entails my acquiring knowledge from many sources and dispensing that disparate knowledge in coherent ways to unformed minds. Teachers make contributions to society only indirectly. We don’t directly build bridges, create new technologies, or provide landscaping services. We don’t heal people using pharmaceuticals, nor do we judge legal cases, […]

What’s with the new fad of claiming one is a Digital Creator? What are they creating, apart from a persona? What does it even mean? At first, I thought it sounded kind of unique: “What do you for a living?” “Oh, I’m a Digital Creator. . .” “A what?!” But I’ve begun to notice that […]

I picked up a really great book at my local Barnes & Noble this week. In fact, I also picked up an equally great book at the same Barnes & Noble the week before. But this journal entry is not about the books. It’s about something strange I noticed. In fact, I have been going […]

“It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to public-relations hype, to imagery disguised as thought, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial.” – Neil Postman It was from Neil Postman that I first learned […]

A few months ago, I found myself in a Chipotle restaurant. This was in the winter. It was around 9:00 PM when I was finished eating and I was ready to leave. It was dark outside. I had parked my car in a side parking lot that had no lighting at all, so it was […]

I’ve often been transfixed by the sports of boxing and wrestling, as well as by the martial arts. I myself joined a boxing club early in life, studied professional boxing throughout the 1970s and 80s, and kept tabs on the sport. In Junior High and High School I competed on the wrestling team, wrestled in […]