Feature Columnists

Abraham Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809. As a young man in the early 1800s, he and his friends hired themselves out to split logs into rails and built rail fences for his father and neighboring farmers in and around La Rue County, Kentucky. Lincoln's family moved to Decatur, Illinois, in 1830. Oak...

Fear can push and prompt you to do what you would never have imagined. In Chapter 12 of Genesis Abram, fresh from receiving the promises of God to be made into a great nation and a blessing to the entire world, enter into the high and mighty land of Egypt. ...

This little songbird is native to the western United States, but has been introduced into the eastern side by man. It has become fairly common across most of the United States. The bird I show here is called the house finch. It competes directly with another native North American finch called the...

How often have you wished someone believed in you? You've felt like people seldom complimented you, or cheered you on. You need an extra boost to keep going. Sometimes we're merely feeling down hearted and discouraged when those feelings emerge. Maybe we're just feeling sorry for ourselves...

Hate causes a lot of pain in the world. It causes damage to others and ourselves. I don't think hate is the opposite of love, though. No. It is a mask to hide behind what we really mean, a way to justify our anger so we can stay angry, rather than doing the hard work of healing. ...

With the Christmas season over, observant Christians turn their attention forward to Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday on March 6. It's mental gymnastics to veer from Jesus' birth to dealing with death so quickly. Life is like this, though. Conversations at funeral homes sometimes include the...

Nature can sometimes provide a crossing place from one side of a ravine to the other. Wind may cause a tree to fall across a deep ditch that would otherwise be difficult to cross. When the trunk of the tree is well placed and big enough to walk on, the downed tree becomes a bridge called a foot...

It's that time of year again. The time of year when many of us boldly vow that this year will be the year we've always dreamed of. The year where those extra pounds come off. The year of deep and meaningful relationships. This year we will finally learn to speak Spanish, paint with watercolors, or...

The world has moved on from Christmas, but the Church is in the middle of the Christmas season, which ends with the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, this year on Jan. 13. For the Church, the season of celebration and fulfillment begins on Christmas day; everything leading up to it is Advent, the...

So you think your problems and challenges are broader, more tragic and heart-breaking than those of others? There are many times when you feel as if what you're enduring is so traumatic the experience is overshadowing your life. We feel like we can't lead our own lives because our mind is so...

I'm reluctant for these holidays to end. They must, and they will, but if they could linger awhile into the new year, it'd be all right with me. We all go back to work, we put away the lights, we stow the detritus of Christmas and we make ready to re-board the fast-moving train of normal, everyday...

This month's weather has provided a number of mornings replete with frost. I went out one of those mornings looking for a good photo of frost. And I found it! I discovered what I was looking for along a low-lying stretch of real estate near a pond. The air was cold and wind was calm in this area....

It is a few days past Christmas. Several gardeners still have Christmas on their minds because of a gift that they received during the holiday period: a Christmas poinsettia. Many are asking, "Now what do I do with it?" If you like your gift, want to keep it and see it bloom again next Christmas,...

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except me and my spouse. The promise we made at Christmas last year was not to buy gifts with assembly required. Yet here we were again up late, excruciatingly tired...

Being in the right place at the right time is sometimes a matter of dressing for the cold, saying a quiet little prayer and going outside. It had been snowing most of the night on this winter day in 2015. The snow on the ground was about five inches deep and snow continued to come down. ...

This little mushroom was growing on a small rotting log that was lying on the ground in the woods. I think it is a "deer mushroom," also called a "fawn mushroom." The outer bark of the small log has long since rotted away and the deer mushroom was growing out of the wood...

Who and what determines whether someone has a joyful Christmas? Do your circumstances signify how happy the Holiday is? For some reason, it seems that the celebration of Christmas brings dread and stress to some, and energy and motivation to others. ...

It happened at the cake bar in Regensburg, Germany, a humble little hole-in-the-wall place where I witnessed what it means to love strangers self-sacrificially, deeply and joyfully: two hip, late-twenty-something tattooed men served me, my family and the other customers in the cafe as if we were...

Apologies to Charles Dickens as his classic words are amended here: "It was the best of people. It was the worst of people." The best: A young girl, probably no more than eight years of age, approaches the Salvation Army holiday station being manned by my wife and myself in Cape. ...

Now that we are officially a few weeks away from Christmas Day, there should be no reason not to sing Christmas Carols, though some of us are still reluctant to sing. I would like to offer four reasons to sing Christmas Carols, even if your singing is a bit off key...

We have two kinds of chickadees in North America. The Black-capped chickadee has a northern year-round range that does not reach into southeast Missouri, but does come as close as central Missouri. The Carolina chickadee has a southern year-round range that does include southeast Missouri...

In a village of 2,000 people in western Germany, strangers helped me understand more deeply what Jesus means in Matthew 7:7 (NAB). It goes like this: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you."...

Whether we dote on babies or not, there's something about seeing, touching and bouncing an infant at Christmas. They are so soft, smell like baby power, usually, and are so cute and sweet. As you can tell I am a lover of the cuddly little people. As I saw a baby on television the other night, I...

The late Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee, creator of the Fantastic Four and other superheroes, is reported to have said the following: "I don't have inspiration. I only have ideas. Ideas and deadlines." Lee's words describe my situation with this column. What follows isn't inspired, but it is an...

Christmas is in the air. I have been driving around town and seeing Christmas trees for sale on tree lots. They have lots of beautiful fresh Christmas trees, garlands, swags, roping and wreaths for sale. This really puts me in the Christmas spirit. These sights also remind me of my growing up years...

Autumn is a good time to see mushrooms in the Southeast Missouri woods. Many of the spring and summer mushrooms are short lived and long gone, but some, like the two I show here, are easily found now that the leaves have fallen. The two different mushrooms I show you here were growing so close they...

Let the shopping begin! Well, continue. Without shopping, there can be no gift giving. When it comes to the art of discerning what type of gift to get combined with the hunt of finding the right gift and staying within a budget, to echo the great Sherlock Holmes, "the game is afoot." I would like...

It is not unusual for deciduous trees in Southeast Missouri to hold onto their leaves into the first part of November. Most years October is the month for our leaves to turn from green to yellow, red and brown. By mid November the limbs are mostly bare most years, but this year was a bit out of the...

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step" is from a famous Chinese proverb. This may sound like a trite and worn-out phrase, but contained inside is much wisdom. A thousand miles is a long way to walk, but it's possible. If you think of the distance in terms of the immense expanse of...

I don't love cathedrals. I appreciate their effort and ability to withstand, but give me humble origins any day. The Dom of St. Peter in Regensburg, Germany, is different. I walked into it a couple weeks ago. Inside, it was dark. I was struck by the artwork: this was a cathedral about human...

This Thursday is Thanksgiving. Our family will spend it the way most who read this column will -- immersed in the smells of the feast to be enjoyed at day's end. My wife won't let me have a role in the cooking. Rarely has. Perhaps she fears the concoction I may create. Mostly, though, she sees this...

Last November I made a trip to Mingo National Wildlife Refuge near Puxico, Missouri. When I parked my truck and got out I could hear ducks feeding along a woods in a shallow marsh. I took my time sneaking closer to them in a perpendicular manner. I didn't want to go straight toward them and risk...

Today, Nov. 11, is Veterans Day. Officially Veterans Day began as Armistice Day. A proclamation under President Woodrow Wilson marking the end of World War I at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. However, President Eisenhower signed a bill on June 1, 1954, changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day which...

I took this photo a few weeks ago during wet weather. It shows a land snail crawling across a mushroom called an Earth Star. The Earth Star is similar to a puff ball mushroom in many ways. The biggest visible difference is the flower petal like rays folding outwardly. These rays are tough like...

What does your job mean to you? Is it something you do merely to earn a living? Does your job bring a sense of fulfillment to you, or do you enjoy the praise you receive from other people, the boss or your co-worker? We all have our reasons for going to work every day -- for getting up early in the...

I recently watched the movie "A Quiet Place" -- which was released in April 2018 -- and was deeply moved by it. The film was directed by Jon Krasinski (you might know him as Jim from the television show "The Office"), who also co-wrote the screenplay and stars in it with his real-life wife, Emily...

In our ever-churning news cycle, the title of this column may not be immediately understood. Let me remind readers. One week ago, a 46-year old anti-Semitic gunman walked into a Saturday morning Shabbat service and opened fire on worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue -- mortally wounding 11 people...

In southeast Missouri trees come alive each year when night temperatures drop into the 40s or lower on several successive nights. This sends the sap in the bark of deciduous trees downward, starving leaves of their lifeblood. As the leaves die they come alive with color...

Just before I began to write this column I looked at the weather forecast for the next few weeks. It looks like fall is going to begin the transition to winter. This transition will result in the decline of beautiful fall colors. If this bothers you, then think about planting some pansies in your...

This photo represents the simplest of photos, but it is still quite beautiful and inspirational. Three elements comprise this image: trees, fog and sunshine. I walked the western edge of a woods as early morning fog was thinning and lifting away in a light breeze. This created ideal conditions for...