Mark's Blog

Last week, while on a bicycle trip across Western Maryland, our group stopped for a four-hour bike tour of the Antietam battlefield. I remembered from my high school American history course that the September 17,1862 battle was one of the bloodiest of the Civil War....

“The war is over now” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in testimony at a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. From a spokeswoman from the Department of Homeland Security, in a May 25 statement, “these sanctuary politicians should be thanking ICE...

In college, we complained endlessly about the food. The steak, served every Saturday, was charred beyond recognition. The vegetables were rarely fresh, and always undercooked. The cheesecake, served once a week, was a rude facsimile. While we continuously kvetched...

The photograph accompanying this post is of my two grandfathers in military uniform. They fought against each other in World War I. As far as I know, they were never on the same battlefield. I never heard either of them talk about their war experience, but I heard a...

I was living in Worcester, Mass. in 2005 when the city required its residents to buy yellow trash bags, which could only be filled with certain items and had to weigh less than twenty pounds. Like most residents of the city, I was not happy with this imposition. It...

On April 29th, 2026, the Supreme Court essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The impact was immediate, and jarring. Several states took the Louisiana v. Callas decision as justification to gerrymander their districts to give significant electoral advantage...

“Pains were taken to connect Ministers of the most dissimilar religious principles together”. So wrote founding father Benjamin Rush in his account of the July 4th, 1788 Grand Procession in Philadelphia. The Constitution had just been ratified by nine of the 13...

It’s called deep canvassing, a community exercise that is different from standard canvassing. Standard canvassing involves knocking on doors for the purpose of persuading the household residents to support a cause or a candidate. Deep canvassing also involves knocking...

At a gathering in the White House just before Easter, President Trump was lauded, if not anointed, with the words, “you are the greatest champion of the faith that we have ever seen in a President.”  So spoke Paula White-Cain, the President’s chief spiritual advisor,...