The “WWHD Conference — What Would Howard Ahmanson, Sr., Do?” — was held August 1, 2018, the year marking the 50th anniversary of my father’s death. I decided I wanted to sponsor it, mostly to honor him. In the tumultuous year […]
Howard Ahmanson
The Sin of Entitlement
Early in my Christian life I was struck by a fascinating quote in C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letter #21. On the sin of peevishness, he wrote, Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And […]
What Christian Reconstruction Gave Me
As everyone who investigates me online knows, in my 30s I was a Christian Reconstructionist. Part of the appeal of that to younger people in that era was the specific blueprints for society and personal action that seemed to fill […]
More on Manners and Customs
Some more issues on the issue of Manners and Customs. The issue of enforcement. Disobedience to Manners is enforced, let it be said, by discrimination and exclusion. Sometimes the person is explicitly told why he is excluded; sometimes he is […]
Welcome to My New Website!
Those of you who have tried to open Blue Kennel have just been greeted with a surprise. Yes, my newly redesigned website is now here HowardAhmansonJr.com. We chose that domain so that way people who are curious about me (and […]
The Politics, or a-Politics, of the Evangelical Church in the 1970s
I came to Christ in 1973, at the high tide of the Jesus movement. No, we weren’t all hippies; the movement swept through secular colleges [even fraternities!] and youth groups as well. It is worth pointing out that my [deservedly […]
Manners, Customs, and Languages: The Spontaneous, A-Rational Kingdom
This particular kingdom is also not one of the three that evangelicals regularly talk about, but in the training of missionaries and evangelists, we pay a lot of attention to it! ‘Missiology’ includes endless classes on culture, and how we […]
I Became a “Decline to State”
Nine years ago I became a nominal Democrat, a DINO [Democrat in name only] as I called it. I did so because it seemed to me at the time that the Republican party was being taken over by a group […]
The Real Reason I Liked the Insurance Mandate
I have often clashed with my conservative friends as to why I liked the insurance mandate of Obamacare [alas, it went away early this year]. For one thing, how is it different from the Social Security Tax, except it gives […]
Unease about Self-Driving Cars
Just recently, Arizona [a more progressive state than California, in the non-political sense] experienced its first pedestrian death at the hands [pardon the expression] of a driverless car. My unease was thereby justified. Computers and machines, for all their […]