The Peregrinating Parson

I just earned my American Red Cross 4-gallon donor badge! That actually isn’t why I started writing this post, but I discovered it as I was checking a fact below. I think my lifetime total is about 6 gallons, but 4 gallons accounts for the past 16 years, anyway. I started giving blood as a junior in high school to the Corpus Christi Blood Bank (not an American Red Cross center, so slightly different donation requirements and rules) in Corpus Christi, Texas. I’m pretty sure that the blood drive was sponsored by the National Honor Society, of which I was a member, but it could have been any number of other service-oriented groups. Anyway, I was finally old enough and had never been scared of needles, so it was a reasonable way to volunteer to make a difference in someone else’s life. If my memory is correct, I missed the last half of English class and part of my NJROTC class to do so; I know that for many of my fellow volunteers that was a perk, but for me it was a downside. I loved

Sixty-nine years ago today, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued the order that desegregated the United States Military. Experts proclaimed the end of military effectiveness and promised total revolt among the troops. As the North Koreans found out 2 years later, American military might was as strong as ever (and the politicians as meddlesome and lacking in grand strategy as ever, but that’s another thing entirely). Without a doubt, there have been problems with racism and discrimination since the military was desegregated, but at a time before the desegregation of public schools when Jim Crow laws were still in effect throughout the South, the four branches of the military cut a path through the racial jungle and proved that we as a nation can grow up. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was an awful compromise that allowed LGBT Americans to serve as long as they were willing to hide a substantial part of their identity behind what society considered “normal.” The men and women

The Lesser Light A Devotion for the UCC Science and Technology Network On the 48th Anniversary of the First Human Moon Landing 14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. Genesis 1:14-19, NRSV Forty-eight years ago today, human beings first stepped on a heavenly body that was not the planet Earth. Neil Armstrong announced to the breathless audience watching from their homes, in pubs and bars, and