The human brain is not fully developed until age 26. (I read it on the internet, so it must be true!) I don’t mean to be unkind, but doesn’t that mean my 8th graders – on average, 13 years old – are functioning at 50% capacity? Yesterday I asked a class whether or not they were planning to go on to college someday. One student blurted out, “No way!” It caught me off guard, so I asked for his reasoning. Here it is: “Why would I choose to go on to college when I already hate junior high so much?!”…

If anger and self-righteousness got together and had a baby, it would be named Gossip. Over and over, from Old Testament to New, the Bible condemns gossip in the harshest tones. For my money, you can’t top James’s take on the evils of the tongue for simplicity and directness. He drops a major truth bomb in Chapter 3: “6 The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.  7 All kinds of animals,…

Here’s a short and pointed quote from an author I enjoy, Andrew Klavan: “Anger is the Devil’s cocaine.” In other words, it’s addictive. People can’t get enough. And they need bigger and bigger “hits” each time to get the same high. I want to add “self-righteousness” to Klavan’s “anger”. I think they go hand in hand. Perhaps they are ultimately the same thing. And anger and self-righteousness are a big part of what is tearing our society apart right now. And the Devil is the dealer.

I really do not know what to make of the media in our country right now.  This article posted yesterday in Rolling Stone reads like satire: Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says “The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated,” Dr. Jason McElyea said. The “horse dewormer” in question is, of course, Ivermectin. Apparently Rolling Stone picked up this story for nationwide dissemination from a video segment by reporter Katelyn Ogle at Oklahoma news station KFOR. …

Yesterday, I posted this quote from Kathryn Schulz’s fascinating book, Being Wrong:  “A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.” It is fascinating that one of the things she implies that people can possibly get wrong…

I recently heard a story about a man who had refused to get vaccinated against Covid for months. Then, of course, he contracted the disease. After a week in the hospital that put his future in doubt and racked up a $200,000 bill, his doctor asked him if he regretted not getting the vaccine. You already know the man’s answer, right? Of course you do: he told his doctor, “No – it wasn’t that bad.” When you hear this little tale, you might draw this moral from it: “Anti-vaxxers won’t admit that they are wrong.” But if that is your…