Terry Pruitt's Blog

My wife and I after our daughter's wedding. Carolyn Pruitt is the photographer. (c)

Since the advise from Nigel telling me to improve my stage craft when preaching, I have been thinking about joining a Toastmasters chapter. I visited today as a guest. I enjoyed myself quite a bit though I was a little scared to make many sudden introductions to people. There was a speech given by one of the Toast Masters (TM) on her banana boat adventure in Jamaica. She did a great job of speaking but the folks were very forgiving on her weaknesses. That made me think this is a place safe to improve my stage craft. Talking about improving my preaching, I noticed a preaching blog cited by Transforming Sermon called Biblical Preaching . I have placed it in my bookmarks. You might consider doing the same.

I have not been up to much blogging lately. It has sort of been a journey that could not go public. Depression regarding my mid-life re-evaluation of my life messy and I need to rebuild. Depression is a good sort of pain, it make you focus on what is important, what is meaningful and what you ultimately value. Depression is the impetus for the triage of life. It is sad, even down right depressing, that people want to treat it as a disease instead of work off the pain as energy for change. It is sort of like an athlete who refuse to train because it is a bother. I had been working through some issues in my head and not getting anywhere with it. I was sort of isolated, spiraling down and just loaded down in burden. Then God gave me a nudge that broke up my downward momentum. For three days I met with three different men, one each per day, who gave me very divergent and helpful types of counsel. The first guy I met was Joe Friday, you know the guy who just wanted to know the f...

Parableman has an excellent discussion about Civil Libertarians and Hypocrisy . Parableman, being the great teacher philosopher that he is, takes on the question of how Larry Flynt and other pornographers are philosophical about the morals of their free speech. I will not repeat his excellent post here but let you follow the link. Recent discussions I had with some friends of mine help me see how the ideology of modernism only sees moral issues as issues of human will and desire. In this sense we are discussion morals as one would discuss a movie, a gourmet dish of food or a painting, it is merely likes and dislikes. However, if we see morality as actually have more substance to it, then we must apply that criteria to the issue of hypocrisy too. Parableman goes on to ask why Larry Flynt is so against hypocracy given how and what he thinks is moral. My guess is that accusations of hypocracy is sort of a trump card in many debates of morality. It is easy to play and easy to reuse....

I had a lot of respect for Jimmy Carter back in the 70s. I voted for Jimmy Carter when he lost to Ronald Reagan. It was my first election to vote. I get the sense that Jimmy Carter is a smart man, a nice man, a Christian man and a dedicated man. However, these things were not the things that people were looking for at the time. We were in the midst of a stand-off with Iran regarding our hostages and we were looking bad in the eyes of the world. While I'm sure some good things were happening during the Carter administration, what people remember is the shame we felt as a nation when we could not get the American hostages back from Tehran. When we sent in Special Force troops, the mission failed. When we tried to negotiate, it was for naught. We just looked bad. We had pragmatic problems like a fuel crisis, but that is not as important as regaining our prestige. I used to have a fellow soldier in the Army who was a fantastic runner. He had a realistic hope and chance of co...