Religion - Frog in the Pot

July 10, 2026

Happy

He was a big man, tall and powerfully built, and he was very angry. I was 11 years old, and alone with him. I had never seen him like that before.

He was slapping himself on the arm, hard, angry slaps, and he was vocalizing. Not words but their nonverbal equivalents. He was grunting and growling. The offending wasp finally hit the ground, but the man wasn’t finished with it. He began stomping on it with his large boots, and kept this up for some time, all the while still vocalizing his anger at the painful sting. I knew it hurt, because already in my few years I had been stung by a variety of bees a number of times, once by four of them in my ankles after I stepped into a hive hidden by a pile of leaves. I had heard that wasp stings were worse. A half-hour later he came back to the sliver of the wasp’s corpse and stomped it again several times, for good measure.

I was both amazed at the sight and, I must admit, a wee bit amused. How many times can you smash-kill a wasp.

I knew the man by his name, Happy. Happy Hughes. I loved being around him. Continue reading “Happy”

November 3, 2024July 28, 2025

Running for President with Jesus and Hitler

For as long as it has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows–and it has been a while¹–I would offer that there has never before been such a strange set as those joined in this year’s Trump campaign for U.S. president. Riding sidecars on Trump’s chariot toward ultimate power are one of history’s most inspiring and loving religious leaders and perhaps the most evil person to darken American politics.

The Bible tells a loosely similar story, but with a twist or two, in describing the Fall of Lucifer. Lucifer was once one of God’s most powerful angels, until his lust for worship caused him to rebel against the Creator, resulting in his fall from grace and eternal life to become the destroyer of worlds. It has been said that Lucifer took at least a third of the angels with him in his rebellion and fall, and that he did so by deceiving them with lies.²

What the Bible does not foretell is that Lucifer ever again joined forces with God or Jesus. His exile was to be in perpetuity. So: How in the world did we reach today’s pairing of this political Odd Couple? Continue reading “Running for President with Jesus and Hitler”

The American writer Charles Dudley Warner offered this statement to the world in his 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.[↩]
See “What Was the Fall of Satan in the Bible,” in The Collector.[↩]

Posted on September 11, 2023September 12, 2023
How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be. Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades. As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it. This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth? That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering. My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense. What to believe in if not my Church and its creed? What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status? If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead? Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”