Dear Friends,

Ash Wednesday throws a bucket of cold water on the culture. “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return” is just about as heretical as you can be in our culture. For the culture far from being non-religious is in fact very religious and dogmatic at that. It embraces not the faith of Christians but the faith of Peter Pan. The faith of Peter Pan simply states that those who age will die. The secret to immortality then is to remain perpetually a child, wishing on a star and having a Nanny to take of you.

Dear Friends,

This Third week of Lent let’s take a look at what I call the “Seven Habits of Highly Sinful People”. Also called the deadly or capital sins. They are rightly termed “capital” because they are first and foremost the foundations of all our sins and defects of character. And the Virtues are the way to overcome these sins and defeat them once for all.

Dear Friends,

I guess we are back to no longer asking for Russian dressing on our salads. After years of the Russiagate hoax, it’s back to maintaining a posture of “despise all things Russian” in order to prove your bona fides and be allowed in polite society. Now we have this: Anastasia, a movie about the legend of a Russian princess who escaped the murderous Bolsheviks, is now cancelled by Disney because it is about a Russian.

Dear Friends,

From our perspective from this side of the Atlantic, we scratch our heads and wonder why in the world does Russia want to invade Ukraine? The days of empires are long gone and the idea of self-determination for peoples and countries has long been established. So why?

The conflict and now war for Ukraine is rooted in a very long history that includes the rise and fall of empires, wars and ethnic strife, political machinations, Western leaders being out played in a geopolitical chess game but also includes the history of Christianity. Sadly, in many ways religion is at the center of this conflict.