Benjamin Franklin is famous for saying, among many other things, that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. If he were writing today, I suspect he might want to alter one of those terms—not so much death and taxes, but debt and taxes. Debt has become as much a part of our […]
Monday, 01 November, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
(PART FIVE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES) How do you solve a problem like Maria?How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? Oscar Hammerstein wrote these words to introduce the character of Maria in The Sound of Music. It’s actually a song of frustration, sung by three nuns in the abbey where Maria is […]
Wednesday, 01 September, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
(PART FOUR OF FIVE) Worry is the interest we pay when we borrow trouble. And if there is anything apparent about Jude in his New Testament Epistle, it’s that Jude is a worried man with a lot to worry about: people “who have crept into your fellowship and speak evil of whatever they don’t understand” […]
Thursday, 01 July, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
(PART THREE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES) If we can tell anything about him from the brief epistle that bears his name, Jude was not one of those people who always walks on the sunny side of life. His letter hoists the danger pennant for the Christians to whom he’s writing at the very beginning and […]
Saturday, 01 May, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
(PART TWO OF A FIVE-PART SERIES) Whatever else Jude was—and he was many things, as he tells us in the first four verses of his short Epistle: a servant of Jesus Christ, a brother of James (and by extension, a brother of Jesus himself)—he was a worried man. Worried, not in the sense of someone […]
Monday, 01 March, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
(PART ONE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES) My grandfather was a boxer. He was never good enough to be a professional, but he did a good deal of amateur boxing when he was a young man and always loved “the fights” (as he called boxing matches) throughout his long life. The biggest compliment he ever paid […]
Friday, 01 January, 2021 by Allen C. Guelzo
Every one of us, I’m sure, has a friend we wish we didn’t have. You know the sort: the obnoxious friend, the really colossal copper-plated bore, the one-subject expert, the incessant autobiographer, the crackpot inventor. The variations on this sort of friend are endless, but our response is always the same. Patiently, with gritted teeth, […]
Sunday, 01 March, 2020 by Allen C. Guelzo