Steveawiggins

LATEST ARTICLES ( 4127 )

• Now You Don’t

  

  Quite some time ago I realized I should read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What put me off, as usual, was length. Long books take a real time commitment, but... Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Truth, Justice, and

  

  Martin Luther King, Jr. attended Boston University School of Theology long before I did. We remember him today as a great leader, a man willing to die for what... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Poe’s Demons

  

  In Nightmares with the Bible I use an idea penned by Edgar Allan Poe as one of the threads holding the book together. One early reader complained that Poe didn’... Read more

  Posted on 19 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Protest Day

  

  Today should be known as Protest Day. Three years ago with over a million others I marched in Washington. The media still routinely underreports the numbers... Read more

  Posted on 18 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Morality, by Contract

  

  So, maybe it’s the crazy wind that was blowing around here all day yesterday, but I’m beginning to wonder about corporate sanity (if there is such a thing). Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Amendments

  

  Funny thing about freedom of speech. It doesn’t really exist in a capitalist system. Words, I suspect the powers that be know, are extremely potent. Any system... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Qohelet’s Advice

  

  Academic hypersensitivity. I fear it’s on the rise. I know I’ve experienced it myself—that flushing rage and disbelief that someone has written a book on the... Read more

  Posted on 15 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Dancing

  

  An artist is never really gone. I have been listening to Leonard Cohen’s posthumous Thanks for the Dance. Haunting in the way of Bowie’s Blackstar, there’s a... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Atlas

  

  The other day I had a hankering for Religion Index One. I don’t think it exists anymore, at least not in the format I once knew it. RI1 was a print volume... Read more

  Posted on 13 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Smelling Winter

  

  We’re experiencing the January thaw around here. This isn’t a scientific thing, of course, and it doesn’t happen every year. We had snow before Christmas, but i... Read more

  Posted on 12 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Geocheating

  

  So, we geocache. Not as much as we used to, but over 15 years ago my family and I began the sport and really got into it for a while. Read more

  Posted on 11 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Strange Powers

  

  Some books take you to strange places. Not all of them are fiction. I began Nightmares with the Bible as a way of understanding the many, disparate ideas of... Read more

  Posted on 10 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Cave Monsters

  

  A story in Discover back in December discusses cave drawings from Indonesia. Dating back almost 40,000 years before the creation of the world, these cave... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Search Yourself

  

  I was searching for someone on the internet (surprisingly, not myself). Since this individual didn’t have much of a platform, I looked at MyLife.com. Read more

  Posted on 08 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Social Madness

  

  I’m reading a book written in the mid-1980s. (All will become clear eventually.) The author notes the connection between social madness and personal mental... Read more

  Posted on 07 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• United, We Divide

  

  I was a teenage Methodist. Or, I should say, a teenage United Methodist. My family had moved to a town where there were no Fundamentalist churches. Indeed, the... Read more

  Posted on 06 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Droning On

  

  According to the New York Times (I don’t have a link, but Google will bring it up), nighttime drone formations have been reported by law enforcement in the... Read more

  Posted on 05 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• New Year Reading

  

  Childhood has a powerful draw. I first started reading Dark Shadows books when they were published for (I kid you not) 60 cents. I got them for cheaper than tha... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• A Few Days

  

  My fellow blogger over at Verbomania (worth following!) posted a piece on the word Romjul. In case you haven’t read the post, Romjul is the Norwegian word for... Read more

  Posted on 03 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY

• Seaing 2020

  

  It’s funny what sticks in your head. As a ten-year-old 2020 seemed impossibly far in the future. And it was very wet. Not because of global warming, but... Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2020 POLITICS, RELIGION, SOCIETY