“I used to be ashamed and embarrassed by my poor background. I know now that I have been preparing for social work all of my life.”

Our family did not look like the other families on the block. My mother’s parents lived on the lowest level of the home’s tri-level design. Our bedrooms were nestled on the top floor. Sandwiched between were the connecting areas of the kitchen, dining room and living room. Another generation…

There are all sorts of national organizations representing racial, gender and cultural communities.

Recently, a friend posted on Facebook a copy of a letter from a church to a woman in the congregation. The letter called out the woman’s lack of church attendance, also that it had come to the church’s attention that she was living a “sinful lifestyle” and needed to stop immediately.

Home is where we center. It is the place we go to when we need to be ourselves. When I get home the first thing I do is kick off my shoes. Then on a pretty day, I sit on my porch and just breathe the air in slowly. I feel safe and ready to unwind. But what if I did not have that home? What i…

Last week, I traveled around Indiana — from Terre Haute to Richmond and many stops in between — to honor the men and women of law enforcement.

Thanks to the vaccines and the new CDC guidelines, this week my wife Diane and I finally took the Florida trip that we had been planning since the beginning of the pandemic. We had to cancel this trip a couple of times and our accommodations had been switched around a good deal, but we are f…

Retentive readers will recall Gross Assessed Value (GAV) is purported to approximate the market value of all taxable residential, commercial, industrial and agriculture properties.

If it weren’t for a historic election and a generation-altering pandemic, the biggest issue of 2020 easily would have been the racial reckoning of our country.

Life is a gem, but it is also a gym where we often have to push through difficulties and reach out for support from others, as famed British musician Peter Frampton had to do nine years ago. He found himself with a constellation of unusual symptoms, including balance problems, weak legs and …

Only a few days after an extremely large brawl at the Miami International Airport made national news, another fight broke out in the terminal last week. Footage was captured on cell phones and at least one person ended up arrested. Shouts were heard and someone screamed, “I hope you get eate…

A friend once told me, “Time and gravity have their way with all of us.”

With the campaigns of 2020 barely behind us, it might seem too soon to think about the next round of elections, but it’s not. A handful of candidates and incumbents for everything from country sheriff to U.S. Congress already have announced plans to run in 2022, and you can be sure countless…

“We always came back to Charlestown for some reason.”

This past Thursday our nation celebrated the National Day of Prayer. Churches and organizations across the country symbolically joined hands and hearts, lifting their praises and petitions to the Father.

In 1972, the U.S. National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse issued a report, “Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding,” that recommended moving away from the criminalization of personal marijuana use and replacing it with a policy to discourage its use. A half-century later marijuana p…

The thing I love about the internet: You start out searching for a topic like “prayer” and you end up watching a YouTube video of a pen-and-ink animated Bambi getting squashed by a giant pen-and-ink foot of Godzilla.

DANVILLE — During the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago, Indiana Gov. James P. Goodrich and President Woodrow Wilson barely played a role in the public response, despite the fact that it killed an estimated 10,000 Hoosiers.

Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday. The earliest promoters of the holiday included Ann Jarvis, the recognized founder, who convince President Woodrow Wilson to make it an official holiday, and also Julia Ward Howe, who wanted it to be an annual anti-war demonstration, and Indiana college …

Facebook’s Oversight Board has both applauded and admonished Facebook for clamping a gag order on former President Trump the day after his supporters laid siege to the national Capitol.

When Ann Jarvis died on May 9, 1905, her daughter, Anna Reeves Jarvis, began a campaign to honor her mother as a way of celebrating all moms as a group.

What is a hero? Maya Angelou famously said, “I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.”

Voltaire, the 18th century French writer-philosopher, preferred an enlightened aristocracy to democracy yet he eloquently embraced one of the latter’s most sacred tenets, the right to free speech.

When new population data concerning Indiana become available, the cry goes out in the Statehouse, “Better call B&P!”

Your odds of being killed in a car crash are one in 102; being struck by lightning, one in 15,300; dying in a plane crash, one in 205,000; being eaten by a shark, one in 4 million; or dying in a tornado, one in 5.6 million.

Some people, I think, are too kind, too gentle, for this world.

“Some people have a plan and vision, and they pursue that. I fell into teaching.”

Opal Nein was a very stylish woman and a good friend over the years. In 1984 she called me and asked if I could hold for Duley Perrin. I didn’t know at the time but later learned was a developer behind such projects as Value City, Consolidated Sales, several apartment communities and much mo…

The almost mournful tone of the song is instantly recognizable for most of us who were born and raised in Kentucky.

In a Scientific American article titled, “The American Obsession with Lawns,” Krystal D’Costa says, “It’s the time of year when the buzz of landscaping equipment begins to fill the air, and people begin to scrutinize their curb appeal.” Since we moved from the country back to a suburban neig…

On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a convenience store employee called 911 and told the police that Mr. Floyd had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived at the scene, M…

In his poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins writes that he asks readers to hold his work “up to the light/like a color slide.” Instead, too often, “all they want to do/is tie the poem to a chair with a rope/and torture a confession out of it.”

There were three stores nearby our house that carried them. Just up the road was the Galyan’s Trading Company, a grocery store that also sold boats, camping equipment and guns. Next door to them, also owned by the Galyan clan, was a Rexall Drug Store. They kept theirs in Aisle 5. The other l…

“I knew we were in trouble when she floored it and tried to run over us!”

Do you use more bad language today than you did 10 years ago?

We are now a year past the darkest days of the COVID recession. As the economy slowly begins to recover, we should recognize that Indiana has still lost six years of job creation. Total employment in Indiana is back at April 2015 levels, and there are only 1,500 more people working than we had back in the summer of 2000. This should be pretty sobering news. Still, as we ponder the pace and shape of the recovery, it is encouraging to consider what good might have come from this disaster.

My two favorite hiking mates and I wandered a grassy Goose Pond levee a few weeks ago, all the while eyeing a flock of American white pelicans as they milled about on the wind-blown chop.

Over the decades there have always been people who decry the loss of simpler times. Booth Tarkington’s novel, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” suggests that the advent of motor vehicles ruined everything. James Whitcomb Riley seems to have regretted the demise of small towns and rural lifestyles.

I must be mindful of when to cut our grass this week.

INDIANAPOLIS — Once upon a time, John Boehner writes, he was “the mayor of Crazytown.”

I am a retired obstetrician, a Democrat, a legislator and a Catholic. These roles may seem to conflict. My advocacies might make others uncomfortable, even angry. But I’m OK with being all of the above. Catholics emphasize the value of life. I argue for respect for human life of all ages, fr…

Mass murder by guns is a tragedy we shouldn’t have to bear.

“All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

Beginning the monumental task of spring cleaning overwhelms many people. Experts make suggestions to start from “ceiling to floor” or move systematically from room to room to clean the house. In our cleaning time, we always began with “the drawer.”

An odd word, justice. What does it mean really? When is justice accomplished? What does it take to accomplish? What does it look like? What does it cost? Have we really ever known a just society? When do we know, who will tell us? Seven letters that require thousands of words to define one.

For Hoosier males of a certain age, at one time few sights were prettier than that of a red-white-and-blue basketball dropping through the bottom of a net.

For many people naps have a rather questionable reputation. Often they are associated with babies, the elderly, and cats. For some they symbolize laziness, a lack of ambition, or attempts to evade responsibilities. According to the National Sleep Foundation, over one-third of adults fail to …

On March 16, the United States witnessed another mass shooting that was racially motivated. Eight Asian Americans were killed in shootings at three Atlanta-area spas. Many Americans were left shocked at the race-based violence shown toward the Asian community on that day. However, many other…