The subject of homecoming queens started in the odd way that some topics enter into a conversation. It really had nothing to do with what we were discussing but then, in a very real way, it did.

On the introduction to the Dr. Phil show, there is a clip of him telling a guest, “This is going to be a changing day in your life.”

I started thinking about changing days recently, when I read this, “... you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God ...” (Romans 8:15b-16)

It seems to me that life is about knowing the right answers, knowing when to speak them and knowing when to keep your big fat mouth shut. I first became aware of this at the tender age of 6. That is when us boys, lined up in front of Dad, were being interrogated as to how Mom’s crystal vase got smashed, the one they got in Europe during their honeymoon.

I hope to be able to wrap up these family stories this week, concluding with their move from Campbell County to Hightower, Ala., just across the Georgia State line near Carroll County.

Question: Before your trip to Iraq, you said that you intend to give the military a “new mission” — all of the combat troops withdrawn within 16 months. Why bother traveling to Iraq and consulting with commanders on the ground, if you’ve already decided on a new mission?

The Reverend John Weber will preach his last sermon as the senior pastor of Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church this coming Sunday morning. After 34 years of serving as the only senior pastor the church has known, John is retiring.

History’s humongous wheel turns and turns and turns again. Over time, mud and sludge accumulate on even the sprucest institutions. Take the 500-year-old Anglican family of churches, Christianity’s third-largest, after Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy.

In one of those front-page editorials disguised as “news” stories, the New York Times blames “the lucrative lending practices” of banks and other financial institutions for helping create the current financial crisis of millions of borrowers and of the financial system in general.

“Hard Times at Douglass High,” is an HBO documentary that aired last June. It captured much of the 2004-2005 school year at Baltimore’s predominantly black Frederick Douglass High School. The tragedy is that what is seen in the documentary is typical of most predominantly black urban schools.

In the crowd watching the Peachtree City Fourth of July Parade recently, a young soldier in Army dress greens and a sailor in Navy whites made me wonder how much they know about the war in Iraq.

By MARK LINVILLE

My family moved to Fayetteville from Northfield, Minnesota in 1997.

Now, Northfield has always boasted a diverse population, and has had few problems with hostilities among the different people groups abiding there.

I’d always heard that love – or rather the loss of it – could drive a woman crazy. Push her plum to the edge and sometimes even push her over it until she was in a free fall that landed her slap-dab in the middle of crazy.

With the reality of Pastor John Weber’s retirement finally sinking in, I know I have to seek my usual therapy of writing about it. No one could possibly deserve the rewards of his good life more than Weber.

Studies show that while some 84 percent of the population of the United States professes to be Christian, only about 16 percent (of the 86 percent) are in church on any given Sunday. Clearly there are many out there who are sufficiently enamored of Christianity to claim it as their faith, but who hold back from attending church for a variety of reasons. Here are five of the excuses I have been given, with my responses.

Marriage is a conversation, and ours has been a wonderful dialogue for the last nine years. Today we celebrated our anniversary in the house that we built together.

We're continuing this week with the twisting connections of these families, with two more added … my Fowlers who had moved from Gwinnett County to the Fayette-Campbell area sometime after 1860, and the Walker family who made the trek to Cleburne and became an integral part of that community.

By Laura Mazer

[Editor’s note: Tony Snow wrote a nationally syndicated opinion column for Creators Syndicate from 1993 to 2000. He resumed his column in spring 2005 and continued it until joining the Bush administration as press secretary in April 2006. Laura Mazer was the managing editor of Creators Syndicate, and was Tony’s editor and friend for many years. He appeared as one of The Citizen’s syndicated columnists for several years.]

A “jealous rage,” Fox’s Geraldo Rivera called it.

Before taping a “Fox & Friends” segment, Rev. Jesse Jackson, with his microphone on, sat next to another man. Turning to him, Jackson, speaking softly, launched into an attack on Barack Obama. “Barack, he’s talking down to black people on this faith-based ...” said Jackson. “I want to cut (Obama’s) nuts off.”

I am conducting my first ordination service Sunday evening. In our faith community, the privilege of laying hands on men and ordaining them to the ministry is reserved for the bishops.

In all the brouhaha over the New Yorker’s satirical cover cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama, a truly “tasteless and offensive” passage in the magazine’s feature article got lost. The magazine piece quotes Obama’s recommendations for how to stop jihad, which he had previously published in a local Chicago newspaper eight days after 9/11. It’s a self-parody of blind, deaf and dumb Kumbaya liberalism:

“Nation of whiners”? I don’t know how you flesh out with mathematical exactitude ex-Sen. Phil Gramm’s famous assertion of last week concerning how we talk about the economy.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As financial storm signals appeared the last 18 months, there were Bush officials who urged drastic reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, according to internal government sources, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson objected because it would look “too political.” The Republican administration kept hands off the government-backed mortgage companies that are closely tied to the Democratic establishment.

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

Despite a report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Va., has continued to use textbooks that teach hatred of everyone not of their specific brand of faith, the U.S. State Department has yet to act to close down the school.

One of the unappreciated casualties of the War of 1861, erroneously called a Civil War, was its contribution to the erosion of constitutional guarantees of state sovereignty.

“You’re where? Why on earth would you be in San Francisco? It’s 10 o’clock here. That makes it the crack of dawn there.”

Pastors get some of the most interesting questions from people they meet and people in their congregations. Here are a few questions that I’ve gotten during my years of ministry and via email for this column.

“All government, of right, originates with the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole. Public officers are the trustees and servants of the people and are at all times amenable to them.” — (Constitution of Georgia of 1983, Article I, Section II, Paragraph I.)

Air power is seductive. From the Army Air Service’s Col. Billy Mitchell’s “Winged Defense,” written in the aftermath of the slaughter fields of the Great War, to U.S. Air Force Colonel John Warden’s “The Air Campaign,” first published in 1988, air power prophets have promised quick victories at low costs.

A friend emailed to remind me of something I had long forgotten.

“I still owe you a theater date,” he wrote, referring to that time in New York City when business had delayed him and he had flown in too late for the Broadway play.