Beyond Our National Shouting Match

Posted on June 9, 2026 by blglick

In May, I headed off to my 50th high school reunion. Nothing exceptional for an old white guy.  Perhaps a bit of background is in order to explain why this journey was anything other than a sentimental indulgence.  

I was born North of the Mason-Dixon Line and raised there until high school.  My parents were part of a progressive, educated Mennonite community and instilled those humanitarian and religious beliefs in me.  Just as I became a teen ager, my father took a job starting the graduate School of Social Work at the University of Southern Mississippi.  We went from comfortably north of Mason-Dixon to the Piney Woods in the deepest heart of the Deep South.   

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Love in Action as an Answer for Our Troubled Times

Posted on January 30, 2026 by blglick
An image of Christ carry the cross while surrounded by a swat team

I find the recent murder of Alex Pretti deeply troubling. I don’t like what it says about my government (yes, mine even if I dislike and disagree with almost every policy and position). It makes me scared for myself, my family, my friends and, well, just about everybody. I’m angry that the perpetrators both specific and general will almost certainly go unpunished by our legal system. Though I know my government, my culture, my country has a long and bloody history of violence against anyone counter to the white, moneyed mainstream, I am troubled by the image of someone being disarmed and then shot in cold blood, a war crime by about any definition you choose to subscribe to. Most of all, I am dismayed that anyone would view this outcome as o.k., as somehow justified by a perspective of heightened threat to God and Country (not necessarily in that order). 

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Ends and Means – What Our Tools Make of Us

Posted on April 5, 2025 by blglick

As with so many topics these days, the terms of discussion of our anxious times have been ripped out of the hands of disciplined servants of language and employed with lower and lower fidelity to their original underlying concepts. It’s a bit like the common reporting of scientific studies when complex and somewhat ambiguous findings are reduced to a compelling if not entirely (or even vaguely) accurate soundbite.

Nowhere is this linguistic drift and violence more marked than in the apocalyptic rantings about good and evil coming from the various aspirants to various thrones. Good and evil have been favorite memes of humanity for a long time, probably as long as we’ve been dissolving the actual world into a rendering of words and art. It certainly has been a fascination of philosophers and clerics as long as they’ve been documenting their thoughts. 

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Shepherds, Family, and Transcending the Darkness

Posted on March 5, 2025 by blglick

So I do prattle on (mostly to myself) about being a missionary of in the dark world that social media has become. There are a lot of frightened people out there irrespective of red or blue, black or white, Christian, Muslim, Jew or Atheist, and that fear, that darkness is transmitted and amplified by our digital additions to reality. 

So what’s a missionary to do? Well, try to offer some comfort, some perspective, some path forward.

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The Lies Power Tells Those Who Wield It

Posted on November 7, 2023 by blglick

First off, a caveat.  This isn’t a bit about speaking truth to powerful people or catching out the evil intents of large organizations.  Yeah, there are those kinds of lies flooding out from the powerful, but it’s kind of like shooting ducks in a barrel or going over already well plowed ground.  This is about the lies that power whispers to those who wield it. You’ll find some familiar themes to that other narrative, but that’s only because power has so beguiled the powerful that they repeat what it tells them without much critical filter. 

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Peacemaking and Power

Posted on May 16, 2023 by blglick

In my third act, I’ve dedicated myself to storytelling, pathfinding and peacemaking.  Those who know me well know storytelling comes as natural as breathing to me.  Over the years, my most rewarding work relationships have all involved some kind of pathfinding either for me or by me helping someone get where they want to go.  So those two were pretty easy to amp up the attention they were getting.  Peacemaking is a little different.

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Loving the Earth

Posted on May 23, 2021 by blglick

Landscape Compass RoseLike any love affair, loving the Earth, being kind to it, is hard work.  This has been brought home to me over the last couple of months as the weather has warmed and various landscaping projects big and small have called.  Two projects, in particular, have conspired to draw my attention to this particular application of the ways of love and effort. 

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A New Journey

Posted on January 8, 2021 by blglick

Staircase EscalanteI’m always struck how our artificial human constructions, a state line, a new year, reflect deeper, less explicit, but more persistent realities. Driving west on US Route 412, leaving Arkansas into Oklahoma, within the space of 20 or 30 miles, you go from the Ozarks Mountains to the Great Plains. One day on that route, I crested a rise and for the first time could see for miles. It was a clear blue day, but the horizon was so far away that I thought I could see the curve of the earth. Continue reading →

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I’m Back

Posted on December 1, 2018 by blglick

Bosch

Well now.

I’m back.

You may not have noticed my absence. In the last six months or so I’ve been mostly off Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and the like, unwilling to support their ever more apparent and pestilent dark side.   It was a huge relief once I’d fully detox’d and wasn’t worrying about what I might be missing (only to look and find the link and meme encrusted feeds having reached new lows in signal to noise and civil discourse to polarization ratios).

But the passage of time time relentlessly changes us all. Free willed or not, accepting or not, we are made different as we are carried along by time. We are like stones in a river bed, polished without willing it by flowing experience, by our very presence or lack of it. So it was with me and the evil phenom known as social media. Continue reading →

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A Prayer of Thanks – 2017

Posted on November 23, 2017 by blglick

Heavenly Father, we come before you on this day of thanksgiving with heavy hearts. We are grateful for the bounty of this table and company of those around it, but we are also full of longing for those who are not with us, for Bill, for Artie, for Tom, for George and all the others who have gone before us even as they are folded in your warm embrace.

Comfort our hearts and lift our eyes to the abundance you have placed in our lives.
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