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  02/10/21  CLICK HERE TO  LISTEN TO WEDNESDAY'S  SHOW FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC 

 It’s springtime.  The frosty mornings are bidding an overdue goodbye, and the time to plant the gardens is nigh.  

The strange attraction to the fruit of the soil awakened in me some years ago -  a  kind of horticultural coming of age.  I find it a perpetually fresh novelty to step outside for a medley of collards, beet greens and parsley for a healthy garden-fresh salad.  How satisfying to put something living into your system, that doesn't scream when you bite into it  - at least, not that you can hear.  I fancy that it also helps cancel the ill-effects of that vat of thick, gloppy, high-cholesterol dressing.  

And while I’m not tempted to enter an agricultural career, my grandfather was a farmer, as were my great and great-great grandparents.  I guess you could say that farming is in my roots.  My dad had the same problem, which is why he uprooted from farm country and became an electrical engineer.  In me at least, that impulse has been watered down to a handful of vegetable gardens and a herd of cats.  As for the cats, have you ever tried to milk a cat?  The yield is poor, the hazards great, and there’s just no market for Meowzithra cheese.  I think I’ll stick to tending the gardens.

We’re at that point in the season where the dirt is turned, the weeds are pulled, and the soil is dunged with chicken poo. Now comes that fateful decision… what crops shall we raise in these prolific beds?  

It’s an important consideration, because nothing ever grows there accidentally, save weeds, and perhaps an occasional ‘volunteer’ plant, or crop that somehow survives from a prior season to make a delightfully unexpected reappearance… like the pleasant thought you thought you’d forgotten that insists on reminding you that you didn’t.

How so the mind is like a fertile field - but unlike these gardens, it requires no seasoning to sprout thoughts from seeds.  Conceptual spores abound, and their fruit ranges from sweet and beneficial to frightfully poisonous.  Sadly, in this sordid age, we are not taught what to plant in or uproot from our minds and hearts.  In fact, it’s in vogue for parents to abandon their children to the predilections of youthful madness and societal decay, in what they delude themselves to be an act of parental love and tolerance.  

It is in fact the grossest form of abdication based on the lie that all seeds bear equally edible fruit.  The rise of socialism, communism, cancel culture and BLM/Antifa domestic terrorism are the monstrous harvest of such seeds of destruction.  Instead of fruited plains filled with amber waves of grain, we are raising Little-House-o-Horrors-sized Venus Flytraps.

The right seeds will ground an individual and a society near the source of Life, whether by means of food that sustains us physically, or the Word that sustains us spiritually.  Plant knowledge and reap insight.  Plant prayer and reap power.  Plant scripture into your heart, and reap a godly wisdom that affords fitting words for crucial moments.  

Our minds are worthy of careful cultivation, and a farmer’s eye for discerning healthy crops from noxious weeds. What would happen if a people devoted to the teachings of the Author of Life were to scatter those seeds about the minds of friends, neighbors and strangers.  I believe we could undo the fields of death our sick culture is presently harvesting.

Maybe, just maybe that was our Lord’s intention.

 4/28/21   CLICK HERE TO  LISTEN TO WEDNESDAY'S  SHOW 

Once upon a time, at the Bull Family Sheep Herding Company, the business owner, Tuff, was trying to figure out a job that his son, Gully, could handle. Sadly, Gully, an exceedingly woke twenty-something, had proven tragically impervious to most forms of employment. When Tuff had offered him the job of shearing, Gully claimed it was emotionally traumatic to be engaged in the fleecing of lower classes. When he’d been tasked with leading the sheep out to green pastures, Gully replied that it discriminated against other shades of grass.  And when he was asked to bring the herd back to the pen at day’s end, Gully contested it was symbolic of oppression to re-enact the plight of sending former prisoners back to incarceration.

Finally, Tuff figured out exactly the job his son could perform.

“Son,” Tuff called, “I have a job for you.” 

“Parental figure,” Gully answered disdainfully, “I prefer you not use such gendered language as ‘son’ when referring to me. From now on, just call me, ‘child.’”

‘That should be easy enough to remember,’ Tuff thought to himself.

“Anyway… as you probably know, Lucky’s field was recently raided by a wolf, and his entire herd was scattered and devoured. We can’t afford to have that happen here or it would drive us out of business. Do you know what that would mean? No more food, no more shelter and no more GAME CONSOLE.”

Gully’s eyes opened slightly. 

“I… I see,” he gulped, 

“So I am asking for you to please be on guard against these predators, and to cry ‘WOLF’ if you ever see one.”

Gully paused -almost thoughtfully- before answering.

“I don’t see anything at this time that would preclude me from carrying out your directive, but you should know that the idea of subjecting myself to your excessive demands makes me feel… slightly oppressed.”

Tuff now paused before delivering his answer.

“I’m so immensely gratified that I haven’t overtaxed your precious sensibilities with this humble request. It’s so refreshing to have such an enthusiastic partner to help me carry on the family business.”

Gully shrugged and returned a wearied gaze back to his PlayStation, as his father… er… parental figure marched out in a huff.

Some time later, Gully lackadaisically glanced up at the monitor to spot a dark figure loping about in pastureland. He hit pause on his game console and meandered down to check things out. As he crept up within feet of the creature, he saw what could only be described as a wolf, but he had to ask to make sure.

“Are… are you a wolf?” Gully stammered. 

The canine figure’s ears turned like weathervanes in the direction of Gully’s voice, before it stood up on its haunches and pointed a paw at itself in an exaggerated air of surprise.

“Who, me? What a terribly specie-ist thing to suggest! I’ll have you know that I’ve neveridentified as a wolf in my entire life, and particularly not when I’m walking about where poor, delish… er… defenseless sheep are known to graze.”

“Then… then what do you identify as?” Gully questioned.

The figure’s large dark eyes shifted back and forth quickly, “Why, I identify as… as a sheep dog!”

A smart look crept over Gully’s face.

“Then you’re probably unaware that we don’t allow sheep dogs in our pastures, because they look too much like wolves!”

“Oh… I see,” came the startled response, as its eyes once again darted to and fro, “You… uh… ha-ha -… you misunderstood me, of course. I merely meant that I identify as a sheep, and… uh… then I referred to you as ‘dog,’ as in… you know… ‘homeboy.’”

“Oh,” Gully’s smile evaporated, before turning slightly peeved, “Well… you should know that I don’t use gendered language, so you’ll need to call me a ‘home young person’ from now on.”

“Agreed,” the creature eagerly reassured, noting the kind of individual he was dealing with, “And I would love to be a regular part of your herd… maybe like a kind of wild sheep… to frolic and play… and to enjoy a meal upon… I mean… enjoy a meal WITH others of my own kind. I just can’t wait to sink my teeth into some thick, tender, scrumptious… uh… -cough- … grass.” The final word wilted in his mouth.  

Gully’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Why don’t you eat some now then?”

“Sure… I… uh,” the canine form paused to suppress a gag, “I love to eat… grass.” 

He bent down and barely nibbled the tips of the bitter weed beneath him, feigning a smile.

“My goodness… this stuff is… - cough-  tasty. Too bad I’m so full from recently wolfing down a whole…  field already.” A greedy fire lit up his dark eyes in remembrance. 

Gully’s mouth hung open indecisively. The figure glared cunningly.

“You aren’t going to tell me you only take animals who were bornsheep, are you?”

Gully’s eyes shot open with surprise and indignation. “Oh… absolutely not! Please, come in. Make yourself at home in our pasture. We’d love to have you. I’m sure you’ll fit in fine.”

“Thank you,” the sheep-wolf replied with a leering grin, whilst mumbling under his breath, “It’s so nice not having to get ‘dressed up’ in the old fleece for a change.”

So the wolf who claimed to identify as a sheep prowled boldly towards the naked herd, as the young wokeling wiped a sheen of alarm from his brow. 

He was so relieved not to be a… sheepist. 

  02/10/21  CLICK HERE TO  LISTEN TO THE SHOW FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC 

  When the Coronavirus first arrived on the scene early last year, the hysterics claimed nothing like it had ever been seen before. I disrespectfully disagree. From everything I’ve observed over the past year, Covid is similar to a very contagious condition we dealt with daily when I was a kid. It inspired dread, required distancing, had its own set of rules, and came with a social stigma. Thankfully, it also had a very rapid recovery time.

It was a blight known as cooties. 

Many years ago, this term apparently described a kind of lice which tended to afflict the poor of assets and hygiene, but after cycling through generations of elementary school peanut galleries, it mutated into a kind of transient, mystical, undesirable condition, comparable to “uncleanness” as described in Old Testament sanitary laws. Cooties defiled with an invisible, intangible blemish, marking its victims as objects of ridicule and scorn. To an elementary school student, it might as well have been fatal.

As I recall, girls relished their role as gatekeepers of cooties outbreaks (I suspect it provided invaluable training grounds for budding gossip columnists). Somehow the homeliest, most poorly dressed girl in a given class was invariably heralded ‘cootie queen’ by general acclamation, and instantly, definitionally became an unlimited reservoir of this brand of plague – the Typhoid Mary of all future localized outbreaks. 

A cooties outbreak began when a mischievous, attention-seeking girl brushed against the resident cootie queen to acquire this odious biological weapon. She then launched a bout of cootie mayhem by touching some unsuspecting classmate, announcing she had been in contact with the cootie queen, and had now come to spread it, along with all accompanying misery… and so cooties traveled from child to child via such playfully malicious interactions.

A hand on the shoulder, or the back, and a kid would shout, “So-and-so’s got cooties!” And now, cleansing could only come by passing it along to some other poor, unwitting, snot-nosed loser to liberate oneself from this humiliating state – so the slower and weaker were always prey to stronger and faster cootie-befouled children. 

The only effective means of preventing cootie-contamination were crossed fingers – so it was always a good idea to keep at least one hand in your pocket. This way, you could pull out crossed- fingers at any moment, following a surprise cootie attack, and thus thwart your disheartened cootie-plagued attacker.

Fun times.

But for almost a year now, we’ve been treated to a preposterous social experiment employing cootie rules to protect us from a second rate flu bug – a condition we can’t even get clean statistics on because so many of the individuals and institutions cranking out stats have obvious ulterior motives for fudging their numbers – whether it’s prestige, power or governmental compensation. By my reckoning, the sources of the most frightening Covid figures are so compromised, so controlling and so utterly corrupt that to trust them is to choose to be deceived. The current powers that be have used media generated fear over this virus as an excuse to treat the populace of Freedom’s Beacon as so much sheep to be kept  

 01/23/21  CLICK HERE TO  LISTEN TO THE SHOW FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Remember Saturday mornings back in the day? You’d crawl out of bed while it was still dark, sneak down the hallway in your batman footy pajamas, trying to keep the floor from creaking, grab a raw pop-tart, push a button, turn a knob, plop back in a beanbag, and enjoy the crumbly crunch of jelly-filled shortbread along with superhero cartoons?

Well, I wouldn’t remember such a thing either… but I’m sure there are perfectly normal, and adequately socialized individuals who reflect fondly on such cherished moments from their teenage years.  Of course, back then, it was the hope of comic nerds everywhere that one day, Hollywood special effects would rise to levels allowing our favorite heroes to live and move and have their being in all their cinematic wonder. 

And then it started… most vividly to my memory with the late 70s early 80s Superman franchise, followed by the late 80s early 90s Batman franchise. But it wasn’t until the 21stcentury that superheroes really took off through the celluloid waters, with X-Men, Spiderman, and the behemoth – Avengers. The DC boys also got rebooted a few times with varying success, up until the underwhelming Justice League – albeit, it did launch the career of the Amazonian Wonder… whose star was unexpectedly lassoed back to earth in 2020’s 1984. Has the cinematic era of these mythic figures reached its satiation point? Has a force arisen that triumphs over even the mightiest of cinema’s superheroes? 

Yes. It’s called, reality.

During the past several decades of relative comfort and normalcy, even during economic challenges, Comic-Con conventions drew legions of cosplay clad enthusiasts representing hosts of worlds that never existed – a kind of United Nations of the imaginary multiverse. But this past year hasn’t seen a lot of heroes rising… and when they do show up, they’re all wearing masks – and not just the sexy ones. It’s hard to suspend disbelief with so much disbelief around needing suspending.

Nowadays, fantasy realms don’t seem to provide the same cultural comfort food they once did, all because of one grossly overlooked realm called REALITY, which is making itself felt all too viscerally right now . This is the world which doesn’t suspend the laws of nature for contrived plot devices, which makes no allowances for the dead to simply pop back to life when the storyline requires it, and in which good (or even not-completely bad) does not always triumph over evil. It’s a world that needs adults to operate it, not adolescents in Batman pajamas wrapped up in their electronic snuggies as an analgesic from the discomforts of “adulting.” 

Is it possible that the hardship of the past year is the clarion call of the God of All Reality, drawing us away from the fantasies we’ve wrapped our minds, hearts and lives around for far too long?

Yes, imagination has its place in healthy living, particularly in one’s childhood – but when people continue to live in fantasyland long after puberty, society suffers. Western civilization is in desperate need of adults who think like adults, as it faces terribly concerning challenges, like islamo-fascist terrorism, rogue nuclear states and deadly new viral and bacterial strains – not to mention the increasing breakdown of civil society, as largely encouraged by activist entities and political operatives inspired by fantasy movements.

The failure of American adults to embrace the challenges of the real world has resulted in the disintegration of our civilization into a thousand non-viable fantasylands. Perhaps now that  reality has come back to bite us, we’ll learn to put down our joysticks, comic books and phasers, so that we can get to work rebuilding the world we all actually have to live in… and in encountering the challenges of that process, maybe we’ll learn that Jesus Christ, the God of All Reality, is the only superhero we really need.

I’m David Summers

 01/19/21  CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW FOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Where did Cain get his wife?

That of course is the staple puzzler posed by the village atheist – possibly because the traditional answer is so consistently unsatisfying - that being of course – Cain married his sister.

Yes, Cain was a redneck, and who knew?  (I bet Jeff Foxworthy did). 

So yes, while a feasible - if kind of gross – effort to answer this question, it offers but poor fare for the serious skeptical appetite.  That’s not to say it’s bad exegesis.  It may even be the correct interpretation.  It’s just unsavory on so many levels.  And while this may not be the specific question that moved Dr. Joshua Swamidass to tackle the topic of reconciling the science of genetics with the story of scripture, he does offer substantially more meat for the intellectual dinner table, to the satisfaction of both believers and secularists.

Dr. Swamidass is not the first to posit the notion that other humans inhabited planet earth at the time of the de novo formation of Adam and Eve, but he may be the first to integrate that dual creation track into a scientific treatise on the human genome, as laid out in his new book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve.  

Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass is an associate professor in the Laboratory and Genomic Medicine Division at Washington University in St Louis, with a scientific perspective which incorporates an evolutionary worldview.  He also happens to be a Jesus freak, and a serious student of scripture.  And despite the armada of eyebrows raised by traditional evangelicals, this juxtaposition is neither rare nor contradictory.  

As a devout Christian, young Joshua’s growing intellectual restlessness crashed hard against the orthodox boundary of origins drawn from narrow readings of holy writ and church tradition. His understanding of the evidence for an ancient earth and eons-long life mutations was utterly incongruous with a literally exegeted depiction of creation in Genesis. This could not have been more distressing to a man of serious faith in the biblical God and Savior of mankind – but this intense pressure dynamic drove him down a Jesus track that lay buried under grassy carpets of tradition, and into views of creation and the book of Genesis that were held by such giants in the faith as St. Augustine and Calvin - suggesting life may have arisen on planet earth over time as a natural outgrowth of the created order. This was the affirmation that gave him permission to believe in both the naturalistic processes laid out in science and the supernatural processes laid out in scripture.  But where did Adam and Eve fit into this?

In the spirit of this finely nuanced perspective, Dr. Swamidass tackles the ticklish matter of integrating the story of God’s creation of humanity with the seeming contradictory tale told by the human genome, and the science of genetics, and in so doing, arrives at conclusions that challenge dogmas and reconcile hostile systems of belief.

With his book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve, Dr. Swamidass explores such questions as:  What is the definition of homo sapiens or human beings?  What is the difference between genealogy and genetics? And how might the entire human race have shared bloodlines that traced their lineage back to both the great apes and the divinely formed original human parents, all by the time of Christ?  In the end, Dr. Swamidass makes a case for both an evolutionary component and a biblical-genealogical component, intended to open doors of evangelism to minds hardened by scientifically-based skepticism.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this book isn’t whether the author has struck definitive truth (he freely admits, in fact, that this is a purely speculative exercise, or kind of scientific-theological feasibility study), but rather, its opening up of space defined by the premise, what will the biblical text sustain?  Swamidass thus weaves his unique song into a chorus of believers singing the music of creation from the hymnbooks of general and special revelation.  When perspectives that cross the spectrum of young earth, to old earth, to complete de-novo creation, to divinely guided evolution can break bread at the table of unity, they show the world that while Christians may differ on non-essentials, they sing the music of Christ’s deity, humanity and supreme sacrifice in complete unison.

And in that chorus, Dr. Swamidass is a welcome voice.