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When I announced my plans to go to Jordan several weeks ago for a press trip, my son replied, "You are the only person wanting to go to the Middle East right now." That was several weeks ago when people were fleeing from Egypt and Tunisia. And he was right, my plane to Jordan was less than half full.
"Really? Gandhi's in hell? And we have confirmation of this?"
I spent all day Saturday at a middle-school debate tournament. My seventh-grade son Luke loves being on his middle school baseball team, but also on the debate team, and this weekend his school competed with ten others. It was fascinating to watch and fun to be there. The topics of debate included statements such as, "All private citizens should be prohibited from owning a hand gun," and "Social media networks should have a minimum age of 18 or older to be a member." They have previously taken up subjects like "Should the U. S. leave Afghanistan?" "Is torture ever justified?" and "Should the Redskins (our local NFL football team) change their name?" Joy and I thought it was pretty cool that a public middle school would even have a debate team, with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders taking up subjects like that, and it helped draw us to Alice Deal Middle School.
Maria, 7, and Lupe, 3, are our next-door neighbors. For some reason, they have decided they like coming to our house. I'm not exactly sure why, we have nothing that I would consider appealing to a 3- and 7-year-old, but they come ... almost daily. Because of this, and our history with their family over the past few years, we have gotten to know their story quite intimately.
Posting an unpopular position in a blog post online can be a bone jarring hit to your ego. Many people will come out of the woodwork to claim you have brain damage. Such was the result of my post last year about no longer supporting football on Christian grounds. I stopped watching football because of the new research that shows that playing the game will, in most cases, lead to brain damage. I could not, in good Christian conscience, support such suffering simply for my watching pleasure.
Eat Pray Love the movie has the makings of a summer hit, with Julia Roberts as its star and Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling book as its source material.
The book was something of a phenomenon when it was published in 2006: instantly popular and penned by an accomplished writer (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002) who was immensely likeable on the talk-show circuit.