Middletree

Baseball fans have watched the following scene unfold many a time: Pitcher throws a fastball. Umpire says it's Strike Three. The batter is out. An argument ensues, the batter insisting that the pitch was low. Umpire ejects the batter. Manager comes out and argues, then gets thrown out himself. Most of the time, players and coaches don't argue balls and strikes, but when they do, why do they do it? In post-game comments, it's usually something along these lines: We don't mind if he calls the low pitches as strikes. But he called that same pitch a ball when the other team was batting.  In other words, there’s an expectation that the umpire will call it the same way for both teams.   It's not an unreasonable expectation.  There's a parallel here with the social media comments about current events, particularly over the last year. Perhaps the most common examples are the social media conversations involving frustrated citizens complaining that (a) BLM rioters didn...

As you take in the following, I'd suggest you not focus on the recent events in Washington at the Capitol building.  That's what's on all of our minds now, but in the long run, it's best to consider the entire Trump era, not just the freshest memory.   As the Donald J Trump presidency draws to a close, I'd like to take a stab at an objective consideration of his time in office, but with a twist: I'll be making a comparison between Trump and two Old Testament kings: Jehu and Josiah, to see which one of these historic kings more closely matches what we have observed in our nation's president over the past 4 years. Why hold Trump up against these two guys? In the case of this particular president, many of his biggest supporters have been bible-believing voters. Criticisms of Trump have been, more often than not, focused on his character. In his defense, many evangelicals have employed comparisons to imperfect bible characters, including kings such as Solomon, C...