CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

I am the son of a Baptist preacher. Growing up as an evangelical, I only knew that Lent was some sort of Catholic thing. When I was a boy the Romano family lived across the street. Once a year John Romano would gloomily inform my brother and me that he was unable to eat candy because he was giving it up for Lent. We could only stare at him in sympathetic amazement. What kind of religious holiday requires you to give up candy? Our main holidays, Christmas and Easter, were marked by great indulgences of candy and sweets.

It is said that the Pharisee of old thanked God he was born neither a woman or a Gentile. I thanked God that I was not born a girl or a Catholic. Girls had to wear dresses, play silly girl games, and weren’t allowed on the football team. Catholics had to endure the rigors of Lent, whatever that was. In those days I thought nothing was quite as free as being born a Baptist boy.

Gordon Atkinson's blog

Human beings have always gazed with wonder at the world around us. Whatever people in the past saw was their reality. What we see now is ours.

The best instrument ancient humans had was their eyes. They lived in a flat world, a world probably no larger than a hundred miles in any direction. Most would never travel to those borders, and anything beyond that was in the realm of the unknown and unknowable.

Above them were lights. A large light by day and thousands of smaller ones by night. They watched these lights carefully. They were obviously embedded in some sort of dome that covered the earth. The patterns of movement they saw... READ MORE.