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Caravans and the Communal Conscience
They’re coming. It sounds like the tagline to a new action-horror movie. But no, it’s just another week in American political discourse. As thousands of soldiers are deployed to the southern border, the collective imagination of our country is gripped by the prospect of a coming invasion. The so-called “caravan” making its way through Mexico […]
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The Edge of the Frame
Note: The following is the funeral message for my grandfather, delivered on June 19, 2018, in Leitchfield, Kentucky. One of the more welcome effects of loss is nostalgia. For me these past few days, that has looked like shuffling through my own mental database of memories involving the man the world knew as Hubert Gene […]
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The Righteousness of Rage
My wife and I make it to the movie theater about once a year—maybe twice if we’re lucky and have a gift card. But even then, we attend merely as chaperones and financiers, dutifully setting aside our own cinematic preferences in order to allow our eager offspring the rare pleasure of stuffing buttery popcorn in […]
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Prayers and Politics
Unfortunately, this script is starting to become familiar. A mass shooting takes place. A group of grieved and angry people react by calling for stricter gun control laws. A second group of grieved and angry people react to the first group by admonishing them not to politicize a tragedy. The first group says, “Well, your […]
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My 6 Favorite Reads of 2017
Each year, I give myself a reading goal and work hard to meet it. Not because I want to be legalistic and bind myself to some arbitrary bar of achievement. But because I find that a steady, disciplined commitment to spending time in the company of books can often lead to an unexpected array of […]
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When You Feel Like a Tourist
Ben Gibbard is a brilliant songwriter. He does just about everything in his craft well. But perhaps what he does best is this: taking that vague, undefined emotion you’ve never quite been able to describe, and then describing it for you in a way that leaves you saying, “Yes! That’s it!” Pull a random Death […]
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5 Questions about Patriotism
For the past couple weeks, I’ve had an article in the works about the great kneeling debate that has been swirling around the sports world. But then this weekend happened and everyone went bananas, so I scratched that article and decided to go in a different direction altogether. Yesterday as NFL players protested and the […]
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Reflecting on MLK Day
This weekend our family was given a terrific gift from the Lafayette School Corporation: a three-day weekend for our hard-working little kindergartener. But the real gift wasn’t in the fact that she got to stay home from school on Monday (as great as that was). The real gift was in the reason behind it. Anyone […]
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My 6 Favorite Reads of 2016
I like to read books. And although I’m in a profession where reading is somewhat of a requirement (beware the preacher who doesn’t read!), I would be lying if I said that I didn’t find a good deal of sheer pleasure in taking up a book and working through its pages. Yes, I read so that I […]
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Why I’m Sad
I’ve spent the last 24 hours in a daze. At 9:56pm yesterday, I incredulously texted my wife on my way out of a meeting, “Trump might win this election.” That was when the New York Times had just updated their prediction, giving him a 51% chance to secure the presidency. But even then, I didn’t […]
Drew Thomas Humphrey
[ faith + culture + ideas ]
Drew Thomas Humphrey 