Category Archives: authenticity

The Danger of Using Stereotypes

I spent Thanksgiving with my wife’s family in Indiana. Some of these fine Midwestern folk enjoy slipping in a joke or two about my Tennessee roots. Apparently, Southerners are racist, drink moonshine, and have crucial gaps in their education. In both the historic and more contemporary meanings of the word, Southerners aren’t “classy.” I’ve run […]

What I Said To A Celebrity

Most of the time I have no awe of celebrities. They wreck their lives like the rest of us. They just have bigger budgets and thus bigger bills when they have to clean up the mess from racist jokes, soliciting prostitute, DUIs, drug rehab, mental instability, divorces, and tax evasion. They make the same mistakes […]

Killing a Falcon

Certain experiences mold us differently than we would perhaps have chosen. We don’t have the luxury of God’s power and perspective. We don’t have a hand in picking the people and manipulating the forces that will make us. While in our nascent state, we have no Olympian detachment that would enable us to see our […]

Opening Day of Dove Season

My friend David invited me to a private dove hunt on the opening day of dove season, September 1. I haven’t gone dove hunting in fifteen years. The last time I tried to bring down one of those aerial acrobats, I need a note signed by my parents to get out of school. My sunscreen […]

Sometimes You Need to Laugh

Sometimes, you can’t muster the energy to grapple with life’s biggest questions: Is there a God? Does God care about human suffering? Do human beings have free will? Should one feel guilty about buying a White Chocolate Mocha from Starbuck? Sometimes, the cacophony of your own problems and challenges drowns out the cries of the […]

Relinquishing Control

Old news: everything can change in the blink of an eye. Back in March, I was talking to a client about an intense search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. I had put twenty hours into lunch meetings, phone calls, research, writing, and proposal preparation. I calculated the amount of hours needed to complete a particular project […]

What is courage?

Whenever I hear the word “courage,” what comes to mind is an orange, sticky-looking substance in a metal tin—orange sherbert. For years, I thought this is what The Wizard of Oz gave to the Cowardly Lion to fix his cowardice. After a little snooping around in the Google Images vault, I discovered that he really […]

Advice to Plagiarists

Back in 2006 I was teaching English at David Lipscomb High School, and my juniors were spending time in a special circle of purgatory known as “Research.” At eight to ten pages, these papers were the longest that most of them had ever attempted. The smaller assignments and grades leading up to the paper and […]

Thank your teachers

The English program at David Lipscomb High School was rigorous, to say the least. Miss Smith and Miss Tracey, my favorite and most demanding English teachers, were legends. Miss Tracey also taught Latin, and when it came time to conjugate a verb, she always chose “neco,” which means “to kill.” This was exactly what a […]

Stop, thief!

Three Saturdays ago, Megan was on her way out of the house to do hair at a wedding. In the bottom left-hand corner of our front yard a patch of flowers had come into full bloom. One tall, canary yellow iris caught Megan’s attention. “Baby, come look at this flower!” It came up to my […]