TODAY IS ASH Wednesday, the first day of the penitential season of Lent, the day when ashes are placed on the foreheads of the observant as an act of self-abasement and a recognition of mortality: "For dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return."--Genesis 3: 19  Or as Johnny Cash would say, "Sooner or later God'll cut you down." There is no mention of this custom of ashes in the New Testament, but it is found in the Old Testament, mentioned in Esther iv. 1, and Dan. ix. 3. The English abbot Ælfric of Eynsham describes the observation of Lent in the 10th century: On that Wednesday, throughout the world, as it is appointed, priests bless clean ashes in church, and then lay them on people's heads, so that they may remember that they came from earth and will return again to dust, just as Almighty God said to Adam, after he had sinned against God's command: 'In labour you shall live and in sweat you shall eat your bread upon the earth, until you return again to the same earth from which you came, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.' This is not said about the souls of mankind, but about their bodies, which moulder to dust, and shall again on Judgement Day, through the power of our Lord, rise from the earth, all who ever lived, just as all trees quicken again in the…

THE Virginia governor’s wife leading students around the governor’s mansion made the mistake of asking a teenager to imagine the experience of a slave:

The tour guide handed raw, prickly cotton to some young black students who were part of a group visiting the oldest operating governor’s mansion in the country, one that was built with slave labor. She asked them to imagine what it would be like to be a slave picking the crop.

What made the request only more shocking, a mother of one of the children said, was who was asking it: Pam Northam, the wife of Ralph S. Northam, the embattled governor of Virginia, who is trying to repair his relationship with African-Americans after a scandal over a racist yearbook photo and an admission of wearing blackface.

But, taking all this seriously if you can (more and more the news reads like it was written by bright 14-year-olds and the normal adult has to strain to adopt the same mentality and immaturity just to understand what is going on), wouldn’t Mrs. Northam have been wrong to have handed the cotton to a white student?! (more…)

  IN THE ANCIENT and evil past, men were men (even when they wore frou-frous) and women were women. It's true! Horrible!