Fred’s Blog

Someone once wrote that freedom has an expiration date, and this may prove true. A little more than 200 years passed between the time Moses delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt to the time the [...]

After my father died we were sorting through his papers and found a stock certificate for 100 worthless shares. They were all that was left of what had once been his retirement plan. He had [...]

Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, is the story of Sir Thomas More, who served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor, Archbishop and trusted adviser until More could no longer support the King in [...]

If you read biographies, you notice a pattern that is frequent in the lives of many great leaders. Early success and then years of obscurity and hardship – even rejection and exile. Two good [...]

For his Easter column, “President Carter, Am I a Christian?”, The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. In the column Nick asked, “With Easter [...]

Carol and I were in Baltimore last week, and our visits included a middle school in one of the worst neighborhoods of the city. The principal told us their students consistently dropped out long [...]

The song is so old that you cannot find the lyrics online, but in 1965 “Spider John” Koerner wrote and recorded “Rent Party Rag” on his first solo album. The gist of it was a story about what to [...]

It’s interesting how one slip of the tongue can fuel an outsized reaction. Because many people are reading the appointments of the Trump administration to mean leadership is being selected with [...]

Many ministries and nonprofits have a section on their website for interviews and articles about them in the media. As you can guess, all are positive and speak in glowing terms about the work [...]

On a hill above the lake of Galilee there is a chapel that sits on the site from which Jesus delivered the Beatitudes. As a boy, I had to memorize the whole passage from the Sermon on the Mount [...]