Easter Sunday. Had it occurred in Depression-Era Mississippi, rather than 1st Century Roman-occupied Jerusalem (and it very well could have), when the women arrived at the tomb they would have beheld a man dressed in a long, white robe, whittlin’ away on a stick, who very likely would have said...

Quint the fisherman, played to perfection by the scene-stealing Robert Shaw in the 1975 Steven Spielberg masterpiece, Jaws, was a rugged, thick-skinned, and independent man who played by his own rules and offered to hunt, kill, and bring back to shore the shark that was terrorizing a small coastal town...

Dale and I became fast friends a few years ago because of our love for the music of that Missouri band of rural hippie farmers known as the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Their song “Beauty in the River” is one of my favorite all-time hymns (of the “not-actually-a-hymn” variety). there’s a...

It’s been almost 26 years since I left Louisiana with my parents, and I still really miss the Mardi Gras season. Mardi Gras is one long, enormous party – in the best, and sometimes the worst, sense of the word. Every single day for a few weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday there is something exciting...

Hugh Freeze is the new head football coach at Ole Miss. Before you ask, “Hugh?” (sometimes pronounced “who?”), just think of The Blind Side. The goofy high school coach at Memphis’ Wingate Christian School who answers his cell phone on the sidelines during a game is a fictional representation...

I love great fantasy/adventure tales, especially ones in which ordinary people in ordinary places find an escape, or rather a hidden entrance, into another world where anything is possible. In the Harry Potter stories – my personal favorite – children run through a brick wall in London’s...

I’ve heard it said that Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose was, and still is, an angry, angry man. I have no reason to doubt it. There simply is no denying that they literally burst forth into the nation’s consciousness with a vengeance in late 1987, and for the next five-to-six years,...

The call for tributes to favorite REM songs went forth, and I immediately replied with my request to write about “Everybody Hurts.” Actually, “request to write about” can be interpreted in this context to mean “begged, pleaded, and may have crossed the line over to ‘demanding’”...

Music legend Marshall Grant, an original member of Johnny Cash’s backing band The Tennessee Three, died this weekend. I had the honor of meeting him about three years ago at the Johnny Cash Flower-Pickin’ Festival in Starkville. After a lengthy time of touring with Cash and acting as his...

It was a cold and drizzling Easter Sunday morning, early just before the sun rises, in rural northern Kentucky. I was assisting the local Methodist pastor in leading the community Sunrise Easter Service. Rev. Davenport decided to serve Communion to everyone in attendance at the conclusion of his devotional....