What's Tony Thinking

Welcome, A Different Famine, Winter in the Wallowa Mountains

Welcome to my new website! You will discover that this site is more dynamic in a couple ways. One, I am able to blog whenever the spirit moves me. In the past I have done a once a week update on Mondays. I would imagine I would do entries at least several times a week now. And this site is more dynamic for you readers in another way. You can sign up to “Follow” me, which means that when I add something you will get an email about fresh content. To do that simply go to the “Follow” button on the lower right side of the homepage and sign up. That way, you don’t have to go looking for me, I’ll come looking for you via your email.

A famine of the Word. After the election last year one of the passages of Scripture that haunted me was Amos 8: 11 -12. There God says to the prophet Amos that he shall send a different famine, a famine of “hearing the word of the Lord.” “They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.” This continues to be on my mind and heart as our standards of truth and truthful speech are undermined by the President and his cabal. The result of constant lies is that people come to distrust everything and are indifferent to truth. That qualifies as “a famine of the Word” in my book. Thomas Edsall had an excellent column last week on the self-destruction of American Democracy, including some very apt quotes from Hannah Arendt. Trump’s constant lying, innuendo, posting of false videos is so destructive of trust that we may end up, if we haven’t already, with a true “famine of the Word of God” because no one will trust anything they hear or are told. Everything will be, “Well, that’s just your opinion.”

In recent years I have made a trip to the ancestral cabin in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon (see photo) to cut Christmas trees on our property there. This year I decided to not to make that 7 hour + trek. But I thought you might enjoy this photo I took last year. The mountain in the background is Joseph Mountain. This year David Osborne published a fine historical novel about Joseph’s tribe, the Nez Perce, and their interaction with the white man, Coming. It centers on the character of Daytime Smokes, the Nez Perce son of explorer William Clark. A powerful and tragic epic. 

Why young women go into the ministry?  Answers here,  In case you were wondering . . . a bit of tongue-in-cheek, and a bit of truth.

My growing patriotism. This is a terrific and hopeful piece. I especially appreciate the emphasis on voting.