I bet you never heard of Emma Lazarus, but you’re probably familiar with the most recognizable closing phrase of her poem “The New Colossus.”

Love endures

“Our jails are a mirror of our community. If it’s happening in our community, it’s happening in our jails.”

Fifty years ago, our nation almost dissolved, when thousands of our young hippy people flocked to Woodstock on a farm in New York state. I didn’t go there, because I had a mission to do. I was a high school principal in the farmland of Kentucky, a highly moral state, and I was charged with p…

A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon, Cameron and I drove over to Clarksville to visit Walmart. He had wanted to go there for a since-forgotten non-essential item. Kind of a non-descript and usual afternoon father and son sojourn.

If we make it to 2020, it could be the end of civilization as we know it. Back on our civilized farm, when we milked our cows twice a day and poured the milk into 10-gallon cans to be shipped to feed people in apartments without room for a cow, we felt good about contributing to humanity. An…

INDIANAPOLIS – Many tragedies ago, the late U.S. Rep. Andy Jacobs Jr., D-Indiana, told me about a tough vote he’d cast on guns.

It is my general policy to avoid all wood-working jobs, but recently I have been forced to repair a rail fence in the parking area of our property. Last year I misjudged how close I was to the fence and knocked down a sizable section of it with our pontoon boat trailer. The instant I hit the…

Guns: 393.3 million in U.S. civilian hands.

I wish that were true, but this weekend proved otherwise — not once, but twice. How hollow those words are to the shooting victims whose families must now bury them. Women, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and just plain employees, working poor people. This must stop, but less than …

Have you been too busy to formulate a philosophy to guide you through life? It seems that too many of us are preoccupied with surviving in the present chaotic world. The way I want to live can wait until I figure out a few other things, such as converting my life to the shocking things on th…

“I know it when I see it.”

Every job has its ups and downs. You have to take the good with the bad; we all know that.

Well, maybe God doesn’t read Facebook in the sense of eyes on ink, but He knows its contents. It must be yet another man-made disappointment. 

A few weeks ago, my wife Diane and I went to a nearby theme park. Unfortunately, it was the hottest day of the year. To survive, we stayed in the waterpark and rented a clamshell cabana, so we would have a place to hang out under shade. The colorful cabana had just enough room for two chaise…

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

INDIANAPOLIS — When the news first broke more than two years ago that Dan Coats would be Donald Trump’s director of National Intelligence, I was in Washington, D.C., interviewing former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana.

In the weeks before Bree Brown died, the 15-year-old planned for a future she would not see.

When man decided to walk on the moon, the first step required a countdown. It takes years of preparation to accomplish those human endeavors that are considered worth the effort. The footprints remaining on the lunar surface are symbolic of the human spirit, when we set our minds to it.

Family genealogical research has completely changed with the addition of digital records. A researcher needs to only log on to a genealogical site, push a few buttons, and then add that information to their own family tree. That is all well and good if the information is correct and has docu…

This year has not been the best year for growing things. We had a lot of rain in the spring which made the soil stay cool and wet, then we had a nice hot dry spell. I know we are all breathing a sigh of relief that the hot spell broke, but the question now is where do we go from here in the …

Several weeks ago, we began a journey to identify the essentials of the Christian faith. What are the beliefs that we cannot negotiate? What teachings can afford not even a sliver of compromise? While there are probably a handful more doctrinal essentials of the faith, we wanted to concentra…

Everyone experiences periodic ups and downs, but some people’s lives exhibit extreme events. California anthropologist Gini Graham Scott says, “The idea of turning points in our lives is a powerful one. It's the idea that at a certain point, a big event happens that changes your life irrevocably.”

In Indiana, more than 1,300 Hoosiers are currently in need of an organ transplant. Nationally, more than 113,000 Americans are on the organ waitlist.

I love sitting on my front porch. Maple Street is a pretty street with lots of trees. You can ride down the street and turn right two blocks down at one of the neighborhood bars. One block down is an apartment community, primarily very affordable housing. Throughout the entire street there i…

The census-citizenship-question sideshow seems to have ended, and thank goodness. Now, we can concentrate on what is really important about our decennial body count.

It took something pretty big for me to spend most of a week in July 1969 indoors.

As we do each year, my family slouched in lawn chairs at a Fourth of July celebration and gawked at fireworks as they burst against a humid summer sky. The requisite live music had blared its way to an end only moments before dark, and the scent of popcorn and smoke from children’s sparklers…

Fifty years ago, I had a fantasy dream. That man was not walking on the moon, was he? Many of my friends thought our nation had gone completely nuts. No way for a rocket to blast off, drop a module down on a huge pile of dust, and then open the door to what? They’d all burn up like backslide…

It’s been a while since I downed a glass of Tang. I’m guessing it tasted better to me when I was 9 than it would now.

There are certain experiences that bind Americans together, like paying taxes, mowing the grass, and fighting with rebellious teenagers. One of these is grocery shopping. David Fikes, from the Food Marketing Institute, says, “Grocery shopping remains the all-American pastime.” There are near…

“Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

He’ll fit right in at the Clark County Fair this evening, crunching the grass with his trademark boots as he shakes another hand. Those are his constituents, after all, and would-be voters he’s courting.

“I used to be scared of death until I found out it’s now called “end of life.” Phew, that was close!”

With Old Glory waving, our nation recently celebrated its independence. Our military forces marched through Washington and magnificence jets zipped over it. With bands playing in the background, our president took the time to explain that he is responsible for a large part of this independen…

This has been a crazy week and my thoughts have been scattered. So, here’s a scattering of things I’m thinking about this week:

You’d expect a guy with Abe Navarro’s position to have a big, fancy office.

“Getting old is not for sissies.”

Eva Mozes Kor took me to task on a spring afternoon.

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball. That happened to me last week. My husband had a heart attack. My healthy husband, my no smoking, minimal drinking, no fat, healthy husband. Our world was in a bit of a turmoil. He is doing fine after a stint to repair a 100 percent blockage in a signif…

“Be alert. The world needs more lerts!” — MAD Magazine cartoon caption from the ’70s

When you fall in love, don’t hurt yourself. Not realizing it, you could be plunging into an abyss. When I first fell, it was like jumping into a land of bliss as it was both amazingly wonderful and deeply troubling; all these deep emotions stemming from the depths of all my body parts. My he…