Kinyarwanda: Forgiveness is Freedom, a new movie from talented African American director Alrick Brown, is not a movie about genocide, though it is set in  Rwandan during the 100 days in 1994 during which over 1,000,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in an internecine bloodbath.

This is the story of a day in the life of Seven Bells, Sunday, September 11th. I had spent the weekend at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, surrounded by hundreds of beautiful old (and young) wooden boats and thousands of adoring fans of wooden boats.

On Tuesday afternoon, October 4, 2011, my sister Faith called from Chattanooga and said, “Mom’s gone.” I heard a rushing sound in my ears and my heart thumped and I said the most profound thing I could think of, which was, “Oh my.” Then I leaned against the wall as Faith told me the details—our 86-year-old Mom was walking down the hall when she just fell down and was gone that fast, likely it was her heart that gave out—and Faith

Ten years ago, in the wake of the destruction of 9/11, my friend Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service (SNS) asked his subscribers to offer their suggestions for an intelligent response to the challenge of global terrorism.  At the time, Americans were frightened and sad about the tragedy of 9/11, and the US government was moving rapidly toward the only reponse George Bush and many others could imagine: an armed invasion of Afghanistan with the intention of rooting out and obliterating Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. 

Today is the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Sword of the Lord newspaper in Dallas, Texas in 1934. The Sword, founded by my granddad, John R. Rice, became the most influential fundamentalist publication of the twentieth century. In addition to editing the Sword until his death in 1980, John R. Rice preached thousands of sermons, wrote scores of books, and mentored hundreds of younger preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham.