January 2025

This past year on Christmas Sunday I preached an unusual passage for Christmas time: Revelation 12:1-6. Here’s a portion of what this text says:

You may have noticed I didn’t have an article in last week’s Tri-County Tribune. I was on my deathbed—or at least that’s what it felt like. As it turned out, the doctor said I had one of the 24 types of influenza currently going around.

It is difficult to envision the early decades of correspondence of American political communication, when communication relied on newspapers, letters that took days to deliver, and word of mouth. Not only was delivery difficult and slow, but accuracy would also have been challenging, even for those acting in good faith. As access and timeliness of correspondence improved, the challenge of bias or slant of information continued, whether only an effort to create a favorable impression or deliberate efforts to shade information were involved. As the saying goes, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” Yet, the challenge of determining the accuracy of what we are told has existed for as long as humans learned how to communicate.