You disagree, now what

My wife teaches a grade 2 class. They were learning a song which another teacher (I’ll call her Mrs. Smith) had begun teaching them on a day when my wife was away from school. As they were going over the words, my wife was teaching them a slightly different wording than the other teacher had taught them. Continue reading


A child’s use of logic



She continued before my wife had a chance to respond.



  4. What you did was wrong.



John Loftus debate







The truth in love

If you’ve poked around at the other site I blog at ( then you’ll know that I’ve had a lot on my plate in the past couple of weeks. My wife had a cardiac arrest on April 16. It’s been a long haul, and it’s not done yet, but all indications are that she will recover quite well.

One part of her journey on the road to recovery is brain rehab. A cardiac arrest means blood is not flowing to the brain on its own. With lack of oxygen the brain starts to lose some neural connections and some brain function is lost. I’m not a doctor, but that’s my lay-level understanding. So she has begun brain rehab.

Her first Occupational Therapist (I’ll call her Alice) was an absolute delight to watch in action, and she gave me pause to reflect on how we communicate the truth to people. Continue reading

Mature, gracious debater

Debates are inherently confrontational, right? The entire point is to make your opponent look like an idiot by puffing yourself up, isn’t it? Debates certainly do serve a different purpose than run-of-the-mill conversations, but even within a debate setting it is certainly possible to engage in a reasoned and compelling defence of one’s own perspective without denigrating one’s opponent. This was recently exemplified by Dr. Craig.

I should offer a quick disclaimer. I have not watched this debate (I had other plans that evening) so I am trusting the following report. The source is reliable, though, and what he says is consistent with what I have seen of Craig in the past so I have every reason to believe that what follows is spot on. However, even if he is dead wrong in his assessment (that’s unlikely) we should strive to exemplify what he describes.

Continue reading

Dialogue with a gay activist

The dialogue recorded at this link is a fabulous example of doing many things right in a conversation with somebody you disagree with. Peter Kreeft was taking a class that was being taught by a homosexual activist. Kreeft hoped to chat with his professor (whom he calls “Art”) about his views, striving to open and clarify their respective views on the subject. Kreeft is right to observe that rarely happens when discussing homosexuality.

But I dare say it did happen in this case. Even Kreeft comments that he was not disappointed. Continue reading

Koukl talks to a waiter

I enjoyed listening to the opening part of Greg Koukl’s show Stand to Reason some time ago. You can find it by scrolling down to November 18, at this link. Very briefly, Koukl had a fascinating chat with a waiter, but the conversation simply didn’t go anywhere! They talked about all kinds of interrelated stuff that was all connected to the big questions of life, but they didn’t get anywhere in their conversation. The waiter’s thoughts and reflections were widely scattered and generally incoherent. Understandably Koukl found this rather perplexing and a little frustrating.

How is it possible to talk for that long with a single person, about so many subjects, and simply not make any real progress in the conversation? Quite simple, actually. Continue reading