With the Olympic games of 2016 still fresh in my memory, I was surprised to learn recently that just before the time of Jesus, Herod the Great rescued the Olympic games and made sure they continued to be played on various Greek islands. He did this because he loved...
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind but now I see. Chances are, you have heard these lyrics many times. These are the words from "Amazing Grace," one of the greatest songs of all time. What you...
One of my favorite new TV series has been the Netflix original, The Crown, which tells the fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth II, current queen of the United Kingdom. The Crown focuses on the early years when Elizabeth first became queen in 1952, and one of the...
I can still remember when I first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas. The Christmas special aired on December 9, 1965, and I would have just turned 10 years old. I recall being out on the playground across the street from my house in the Chicago suburb of Villa Park when I...
Fidel Castro is dead. But the Ladies in White live on. Yoani Sanchez, one of the strongest voices for freedom in Cuba, tells about the origins of the Ladies in White movement in a 2011 opinion piece in The Washington Post: "Eight years ago, Laura Pollan was a...
I’m not sure what historical novelists did before the advent of the Internet. What takes a matter of minutes to discover on the Internet today probably took hours of library work in the pre-Web Stone Age. A case in point: In my first historical novel, The...
"For the first time in centuries, scientists have exposed the original surface of what is traditionally considered the tomb of Jesus Christ," says an online article from National Geographic. "Located in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem,...
The audience exploded into applause. Every person in the room jumped up and began to wildly clap, as if racing each other to see who could get to their feet the fastest. The applause was all to honor the dictator Joseph Stalin at a 1937 conference of the Communist...
Some called it a murdering machine. But the question was: Who faced the greatest risk from this machine—the enemy or the men operating it? Eight men were jammed side by side in this cramped Civil War submarine, with walls 3½ feet apart and the ceiling about 4 feet...
The world-famous fantasy epic, Lord of the Rings, might never have been written if the author had not come down with a fever. The author of the trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, was an officer for the British army during World War I. But when he came down with “trench...