What is the greatest hymn of all time?
The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada recently addressed that question. In their annual conference in Dallas, they voted using their society’s website, on Facebook, and in person during a competition set up with brackets like the NCAA basketball tournament.
If you thought the answer is “Amazing Grace,” you need more grace. It turns out, “Holy, Holy, Holy” won the title.
My great-aunts Daisy and Clara were convinced that humans never went to the moon.
I asked them about the television broadcast we all watched; they claimed it was filmed by Hollywood actors on sand dunes in Arizona. I asked them about the testimony of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin that they had been to the moon; they said the astronauts had been paid to lie. I asked them about the moon rocks they brought back; they asked me, “How do you know they’re from the moon?”
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identified the moon landing as the most significant event of the twentieth century. More than 530 million people watched the broadcast of the moon landing on television. It is estimated that 93 percent of all the televisions in the US were tuned into the event.
Fifty years ago this Saturday, at 1:46 p.m., astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin separated the lunar landing craft from the Apollo 11 command module. As they moved toward the moon, astronaut Michael Collins stayed behind. He was 250,000 miles from earth.
President Trump’s tweets and statements about four Democratic congresswomen have been dominating the news this week.
Critics are decrying his rhetoric as racist. Several Republicans joined a wide range of Democrats in criticizing the president’s comments. Democrats in the House of Representatives (joined by four Republicans and one Independent) passed a resolution yesterday condemning his statements. Historian Jon Meacham claimed that Mr. Trump is the most racist president since Andrew Johnson.
Most Americans celebrate ten holidays each year, beginning with New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas. Now it seems we’ve added an eleventh to the list.
In a day when humans can land a spacecraft on an asteroid and cameras can automatically translate signs for travelers, it is hard to understand why we must live at the mercy of forces we cannot predict or control. But we do.
Tropical Storm Barry is causing a crisis on the American Gulf Coast. It is forecasted to make landfall along the Louisiana coast tonight or tomorrow and could strengthen into a hurricane beforehand.
If a structural engineer in Southern California is right, half a million people in his state are living in buildings that are likely to collapse if an earthquake strikes.
Ross Perot died yesterday morning in Dallas after a five-month battle with leukemia. He was eighty-nine.
