Never let it be said that Joel Cowan needed two little old women to defend him.

No, typically, the Godfather (not “father”) can defend himself from “misstatements” like those in a column by former Peachtree City Mayor Steve Brown in The Citizen, May 13.

When I learned that a friend had decided to plunge himself into the political world and run for office, I thought it prudent to offer two pieces of solid advice.

You probably have one at your church.

If you don’t have a church right now, you’ve probably encountered one somewhere along the way.

We have one.

Please, I mean absolutely not to take anything away from any of the others on the team, but there’s just one who must be given the designation VBS – MVP — Vacation Bible School – Most Valuable Player!

Forty-eight times a year, on Friday mornings at 7:30 a.m., 100 professional people gather at First Baptist Church in Peachtree City, Ga., people who have a common mission and who are united in purpose.

All the most interesting issues are moral in character, having to do with how we behave and why. The most interesting story of the past week — with due respect to Nancy Pelosi and other outliers — had to do with abortion, a moral issue of very supreme relevance, no matter of the depth or nature of one’s views on the matter. There was first of all a Gallup Poll. Then there was a presidential visit to Notre Dame University.

Last winter The Wife took me on a walking tour of her alma mater, the University of Virginia. After an hour tour of the grounds, we wondered to the center of the university.

Things are not always as they appear in the Middle East. Appearances can also deceive whenever an Israeli prime minister and a U.S. president get together in Washington.

President Obama’s articulated criteria for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is: “We need somebody who’s got the heart to recognize — the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

When all of America’s top health insurers and providers met at the White House last week and pledged to save $2 trillion over the next decade in health costs, they were pledging to sabotage our medical care. The blunt truth, which everybody agreed to keep quiet, is that the only way to reduce these costs is to ration health care, thereby destroying our system.

Parents get their children in an awful lot of trouble by erasing the word “no” from their vocabularies. After laboring to produce a muffled “da-da” and “ma-ma,” the word “no” comes roaring out of the toddler’s mouth crystal clear, usually as an exclamation.

Every semester I am a guest lecturer for two hours at Newnan High School on the myths and truths of the Vietnam War. It almost seems Samuel Clemmons was looking to the future Vietnam War when he said in the 1800s, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

One night at the supper table, my brother-in-law took a teasing jab at me over a sour business deal. I was plenty aggravated at the people with whom I had dealt and Rodney, who is quick to spot an Achilles heel, had pinched a bit hard.

(This column initially ran on 12-5-79 in This Week in Peachtree City)

Someone asked me recently about the Banks family that settled on Greer’s Mountain long before Peachtree City was anybody’s pipe dream. I realized again how many people have moved here in the decades since most of us staked our own claim to this beautiful spot of the Earth.

Answers to your questions about life, religion and the Bible

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

As was evident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it is deja vu, 1961, all over again. We have a young, cool, witty, personable president — and an adoring press corps.

A crime may have been committed recently at the Pine Hill Cemetery in Auburn, Ala. Mary Norman, according to an Associated Press report, was visiting her family’s burial plot at the Pine Hill Cemetery when a man walked over and removed a flag from a grave, snapped it in two, and drove off.

I’ve lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles.

Watch what you say. It can and will be used against you in the Court of Mom.

There is an old saying: “Think before you speak.” And like many old sayings, it provides sage advice. But over the years I’ve learned something extremely important. If you have to think about what you’re about to say, it’s probably in your best interest not to say it.

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists.

What to call black people has to be confusing to white people. Having been around for 73 years, I have been through a number of names. Among the polite ones are: colored, Negro, Afro-American, black, and now African-American. Among those names, African-American is probably the most unintelligent.

This brief travelogue traces one of our earliest trips to Europe. Didn’t want you to think we’re footloose again, although I’m hoping we’ll get there this year. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen our daughter Mary, an opera company pianist, beginning in Stuttgart, Germany in 1984 and working for several other houses in the years since. She’s alighting later this summer for a new job in Duesseldorf.

Despite Gen. Colin Powell’s advice that the Republican Party must move to the center, now is not the time for triangulation by the GOP. It is, rather, the time for the Party to stand firm and fast upon its principles and let this nation come around to its way of thinking, driven by horror at the consequences of Obama’s program.

Sometimes people can fool themselves into believing just about anything if they keep saying it enough. Truly, parties can become too ambitious with their storytelling in an attempt to persuade others of an altered reality, a shift in historical fact.

Louise and Selena, being the genuine Southerners they are, both had a hankering for fried chicken. And I, of course, knew just where to find the perfect recipe.

It is always fashionable to slam the rich unless the rich are fashionable. Rich industrialists and stock barons are evil; wealthy athletes and movie stars are chic. This paradox is one of the consistent social tangles of humans. It guides our social values, but limits our humanity.

By Sheldon Richman

David Brooks, the New York Times’s resident neoconservative, delights in peddling a false alternative: freedom or social order.

Sometimes I briefly wonder what I’d be doing if God had not called me into the pastorate. I might be the owner/operator of a small town radio station.

One would think that a week-long meeting on theology would not be a riveting affair. At least, that was my assumption before I traveled to Orlando, Fla., a few days ago to be an observer at our denomination’s International Theological Conference.

The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Other than clicking the mouse when it comes to computers, I’m not only clueless, I’m geekless.