“By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.” (from Psalm 42 ESV)

My hair’s getting kind of long. It’s below my collar, and probably longer than is strictly suitable for a Bible school librarian. I take it as a sign of great sophistication around work that nobody’s brought it to my attention yet.

I intend to get it cut next week. But this weekend we have the annual Viking Feast of the Viking Age Club & Society, so I figure I’ll keep it long until then.

Also it helps keep me warm.

I’ve worn my hair longer than not most of my life, and have continued to do so even though fashion has long since passed me by. My motivations, so far as I can discern them, are historical. Continue reading I meditate on the length of my hair →

I wonder how many people hold politically conservative values but shy away from labeling themselves conservative due to the baggage they associate with the term. I wonder how many people hold these values while voting for political leaders who oppose them. I know voters are individuals, voting and abstaining for good and bad reasons, but I think part of the blame for this disparity falls on those of us who call ourselves conservative. We have not communicated well enough, or as Bertie Wooster might say, we’ve flubbed it before giving it a good go. Ok, he wouldn’t say that, but you get the idea. Don’t you? Nevermind.

On Monday, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., and columnist Jackie Gingrich Cushman writes about the typical ideas associated with the day, but I have another idea. I think King’s words are apt for today’s conservatives.

“For many years we have shown an amazing patience,” King said, and I think conservatives have shown a good bit of patience as well. We have, as King went on, sometimes given our American brothers in government and elsewhere “the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated.” But today I say we need to be “saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

Freedom and justice are what conservatives promote. We want nothing less for our American brothers than life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness. I tend to think we have been too patient in our attempts to be understood—-patient and a bit wrong-headed.

Conservatives don’t want to cut government spending. We want to keep bureaucracy from hamstringing your freedom.

Conservatives don’t want to cut taxes. We want you to keep as much of your hard-earned paycheck as possible. We also don’t want to punish you for succeeding in business or saving over the years by taxing you unfairly.

We don’t want to throw out immigrants who are trying to make a new life for themselves in our country. We want a stable process for welcoming immigrants into our country.

And we don’t want to deny women healthcare choices. We defend the lives and freedoms of every man and woman from conception to old age.

Conservatives champion loving our neighbor as we would ourselves, which includes defending the helpless and helping the poor and orphaned, but here’s the rub between us and liberals; Continue reading Conservatives Have Been Too Patient →

Alisha Harris of World blogs on a law firm that has asked the IRS to scrutinize one of the firm’s clients, a pastor who delivered a political sermon. Harris writes that the firm, The Becket Fund, “maintains that a pastor should even be able to endorse or condemn certain candidates from the pulpit, as long as he is speaking privately to his congregation.” The tricky IRS code has only been on the books since 1954. One of the Becket Fund lawyers said, “For a hundred and seventy odd years of our history, people were allowed to speak freely without fear of losing any tax exemption and our country was not turned into a theocracy because of it, not even close.”

I agree. I don’t know what problems must be overcome in our current tax code, but I don’t understand why pastors or non-profit organization leaders must mussel themselves on specific political issues or people. People should be able to talk openly about anything, especially government.