Editor’s Note: Nancy Patrick is a regular contributor to Spirit of Abilene. Her columns usually carry weight, but she recently posted the following “Lessons Learned,” with both insight and humor, on Facebook. Read and enjoy. Lessons learned from COVID-19 quarantine from Nancy Patrick 1. I know there is no one I had rather been quarantined with than my sweet husband
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS For sports fans, this pandemic has been frustrating. Sports provide us with rhythms in the year; we use the word “season” not only for changes in the temperature and moisture, but also for which sport is when. The Major League Baseball season is trying to get a start here in the middle of the summer season rather
Read moreIDLE AMERICANCommentary by Dr. Don Newbury Until mid-twentieth century, most American women had every right to sing “washday blues,” because one day of the week–for most, the longest day–was committed to washing, hanging out, ironing and folding the family duds. The day started with a trip to the laundromat, since most homes at the time were lucky to have indoor plumbing,
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Jemar Tisby, an author, speaker, and president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, will be guest speaker for the 2021 Don Williams & Royce Money Distinguished Lecture Series at Abilene Christian University Feb. 10-11, 2021. The series is hosted by The Carl Spain Center on Race Studies & Spiritual Action at ACU. Tisby holds a bachelor’s degree from the University
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By LORETTA FULTON Vacation Bible School already was unique at Southern Hills Church Christ, so children’s minister Holly Racca wasn’t thrown for a loop when the coronavirus interrupted this summer’s plans–even if it was her first year to be in charge. Several years ago, under the leadership of Ryan Maloney, former children and family minister at Southern Hills, the church
Read moreBy DANNY MINTON In the ’50s there were a lot of stories still hanging around from the World War II years. I remember one in particular about three little boys. One day these three boys were sitting around and began to argue about their dads and the war. The boys were boasting, as we may have done ourselves, about how
Read moreIDLE AMERICANCommentary by Dr. Don Newbury My late father, T. J. Newbury, was a grand story teller. Friends and neighbors in Early, Texas, gave him high marks for joke-telling, and so do I. Usually, hearty “ho-ho’s” erupted when the punch line was unleashed, but on the rare occasions when silence hung heavy and listeners looked blankly as if ghosts had been
Read moreBy NANCY PATRICK Not often heard today, the word “integrity” has disappeared from most people’s vocabulary. Everyone seems to know what courage, honesty, sincerity, responsibility, and reliability mean; however, the word “integrity” seems even more abstract than those qualities. Definitions of the word include “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness; the state of wholeness
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Buried within this true, but weird, anecdote, is a fact that hardly anyone ponders: “How many rolls of toilet paper does it take to completely wrap a human being—head, body, arms, and legs?” One of my enriching academic experiences was to break away from the science building occasionally and audit university classes in other disciplines. One extended
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