Looking back, it was rude of them yet beneficial — If you were around here last year, you will surely recall the semi-ridiculous madness that was the Medium Writing Challenge. If you weren’t around consider yourself lucky, for you managed to avoid coming up with stories based on the single-word prompts of space, work, re-entry, and death, all in the…

Oh, the hundreds I have to leave behind… — Back in May, I responded to a challenge from Alex Markham to write a story about the eight songs I would take to a desert island. Amazingly, even while writing that one it never occurred to me to ask myself which books I would take along in a similar situation…

Part Seven of the ‘Not Many Mighty’ series — We’re past the halfway point in the “Not Many Mighty” series and before tackling a group of well-known biblical figures (yes, Peter will be there), there is one “minor” character that deserves a brief look. I put minor in quotes because though he personally appears only briefly in the New…

Sometimes all you can do is survive the day — Over the past year or so, I’ve written several articles with the goal of making Mondays a little bit less of a suck-fest with music that will lift your mood (I’ll link to them at the end). I realized very early on this Monday morning, however, that sometimes Monday simply…

Only in America… — I tend to not follow what’s trending on Twitter, having destroyed enough brain cells with Wild Turkey in the ’80s and ’90s to last the rest of my life, but sometimes the nonsense is impossible to avoid. In the past few days, as war still rages in Ukraine and inflation…

A book review — If you are interested in the history of the popes of the Catholic Church, the reading options can be daunting, and not just because there have been 266 of them over the past 2,000 years. The sheer size of the volumes are enough to give the most committed reader pause…

I think I’m addicted to this prompt — Most of the prompts/writing challenges you’ll find on this site are one-offs; you accept the challenge, publish, and move on to the next article. The very nature of most of them dictates that they’re a one-time thing; for example, I can only write once about my favorite songs from the…

These are stubbornly persistent — “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.” — Galadriel, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Myth and history have been intertwined for as long as humans have walked the earth. In ancient times they were often…

Christians should be outraged, but are we? — Politicians quoting the Bible in an effort to garner votes or appeal to the religious beliefs of their supporters is nothing new; politicians quoting a verse completely out of context is equally common. For example, a favorite verse used when appealing to Christian voters is 2 Chronicles 7:14, which says: …