Lions and Eagles

One of my Facebook friends started a conversation inspired by this article  on ideas that Theatres should take up for their survival. The full thread is here . I just wanted to capture one of my own contributions: On supporting artists with our paychecks, I think the best we can do is to fight the economic culture of debt and dependency that we have. Help people learn to get out of debt and build personal wealth, not as a goal in and of itself, but as a means towards the end of enabling more generous giving. I'm a big Dave Ramsey fan, and he talks a lot about giving as the end goal of achieving economic freedom. We've got some great theatre programs for teaching physical health, and mental health. Why not have some support for personal financial health? That's my radical idea. While we're at it, teach aspiring artists to treat student debt like poison. Get an education, but don't get into debt for it. As far as tax dollars, I'm going to make myself very un...

I recently ran across an article by a Presbyterian minister on 10 political things one supposedly cannot do while following Jesus. While I respect the author's viewpoints and even praise some of his motivations, I did personally find the article to be very heavily weighted towards one side of the political aisle. In order to offer a counterbalance, I thought I might offer my own list of 10 more political things, as seen from a different perspective. This will get long, but I'll ask you to bear with me. I feel it's very important to be clear not only with what I am saying, but also with what I am very specifically not saying. 10) Allow public expressions of faith to be silenced If you have good news, the best news in the world, do you not want to share it? If the news you have may save countless lives, are you not obligated to share it? The Gospel is Good News. Indeed, we have a Great Commission from our Lord himself to spread his News to every tribe, every tongue, every...

This is for all my theatre friends in the Atlanta/Fulton County area. Now if you know me, you know that I love theatre. I have been onstage, backstage, in the box office, on a theatre board, and many, many times just in the audience. I married a beautiful actress that I met while doing Shakespeare, and many of my dearest friends are theatre folk. I've been excited to support community theatre, professional theatre, educational theatre, puppetry, dance, and more. This is about the news that the Fulton County Arts Council almost lost their funding from the county recently. At the recent County Commission meeting, it came down to a decision between supporting the actors or new beds for the women's prison, and it looks like some of those ladies are just going to have to sleep on the floor for a bit. So, if you're a woman in Fulton County, try not to go to jail, okay? You know that I love and support the arts. At the same time, my wife and I have been listening to a lot ...

Last time I did one of these voting guides, I had some friends say, "Thanks, but we need one page we can just print off and take to the ballot box!" Well, here you go! Here's the quick list (along with links to get back to my reasoning, just in case you want to check my work).

Part three of this November's voting guide, now we tackle the ballot questions! Two Constitutional Amendments, one Tax! Unless I decide to wade into the Presidential race at some point later on, this will be the last of it. Please read on....

Now for the next race on my November ballot: Fayette County Board of Education:

Hey, we're almost down to a month before Election Day! The voting guide I did for the primary was such a huge help, especially for the local races, I'm going to do it again! I'm going to skip over the Presidential election for now. We can come back to that later, if we have time. I want to focus for a bit on those easily-missed races, the state and local offices and the ballot questions. Those offices are much closer to home than the Presidency, and all too often we just don't give them the attention they deserve. Let's start with the Georgia Public Service Commission. We have two seats up on the ballot for this race. For the primary, I voted for one incumbent, and against another. I'm going to do so again this time around. Here's why: