On March 4, 1933, the newly elected president of the United States delivered his inaugural address to the nation.  Four sentences into that address, Franklin Roosevelt uttered the words that have lived long beyond his four-term presidency:  “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”  So spoke the nation’s leader in that dark hour of economic despair.

You won’t think less of me, will you, if I admit that I’m not a country music aficionado?  But hurrying to catch a plane in Minnesota a few weeks ago, I caught the refrain of a country song.  With one hand on the wheel, I scribbled the words down, googled them back at home, and discovered what’s turned out to be the most requested country song in America this summer.

How would you like to teach school in New Orleans? The government is endeavoring to attract new teachers to what, even before Hurricane Katrina, was one of the toughest and most challenging school districts in the nation. But now in the post-traumatic stress of that crippled city, recruiters are offering to every teacher willing to move to the Crescent City a two-year signing bonus of $17,000. Any takers? Fact of the matter is that whether you teach in New Orleans or Benton Harbor or Berrien Springs you’ve signed on to a very demanding profession. U.S.

Should we send out a search party?  Anybody know where summer disappeared to?  I’m not a prophet, nor the son of one, but I did prophesy to Karen back in May that this summer would be over before it even started.  Was I right?  (Just don’t ask me to predict the stock market this fall!)

It is reported that Christopher Columbus, when he first sighted that landfall, exclaimed:  “Gracias a Dios que hemos salido de esas honduras!”—”Thank God we have come out of those depths!”  And it stuck—that word “depths”—becoming the proud name of the glorious land from which we’ve just returned.  Honduras.  From its jungled mountain peaks above 9000 feet to its white-sanded coastline, from its sprawling estates for the wealthy to its impoverished barrios for the masses, this nation of seven million is a dramatic study in contrasts.

Responding to last weekend’s terrorists’ attempts in London and attack in Glasgow, syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer has suggested that the stories are getting greater play in the U.S. than in Europe.  He reasons that because Europeans have been living with bombings since the world wars, they aren’t as easily panicked over the recent spate of terrorist attacks.  Perhaps he’s right.  Though how any society could accept “an occasional terrorist attack” as “one of the costs of doing business in the modern world” is beyond me.

What would happen if it rained simultaneously all over the world?  Every nation, every land deluged with a global downpour.  Did you see the pictures out of Texas this week?  Flashfloods up the roofs of mobile homes because of sustained thunderstorms.  People clinging to those rooftops, waiting for rescue boats to sail up used-to-be streets.  Imagine an entire planet awash in rain showers.

If the rocks could talk, what a tale they would tell.  Having just returned from four days in the Piedmont valleys of northwestern Italy with a class of architecture students here at Andrews University, I can only imagine the stories that are etched deep into the crags of the rocky sentinels that guard the seven valleys of the Waldenses.  Jetlagged I woke up early our first morning beside the Pellice River and walked the valley just as the first orange rays of sunlight were illuminating the ragged snow-capped peaks ringing the green fields and forests beneath them.  A thousand years earlier

By the time you read these words, I’ll be standing on one of the most sacred sites of truth.  History’s saga of the Waldensees (also known as the Vaudois) remains today one of the tragically glowing narratives to shine out of the dark Middle Ages.  Their very name “evokes memories of an ancient and honorable ancestry, whose devotion, perseverance, and suffering under persecution have filled some of the brightest pages of religious history, and have earned immortality in Whittier’s charming miniature and Milton’s moving sonnet.”  So wrote Leroy Froome in his magnum opus, Prophetic Faith of O

Listen to the “Motley Fool.” While most of us don’t suffer fools lightly, the Motley Fool is one voice we’d do well to pay heed. Last week I began a two-part mini-series that I’ll conclude today, “The Awkward Ambitions of a Middle Class” (both teachings are at our website: www.pmchurch.tv). Thanks to James D. Scurlock’s new book, Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders, you and I have found the courage to take on the shameful secret nobody wants to talk about—personal indebtedness.