Am I a (gasp!) Conservative
Most people who know me would call me a liberal—my relatives and friends as well as other acquaintances. I have generally accepted the “L” word as a wonderful adjective, suggesting as it does generosity and beneficence. Of course I know that for some of my acquaintances it is the ultimate put down. They sometimes preface it with modifiers like bleeding-heart and tree-hugging, but these, too, strike me as words with positive connotations. A bleeding-heart is one that feels compassion for the down and out as Jesus does in the gospels again and again: “He had compassion on them.” And tree-hugging is, in my lexicon, a description of people who care deeply about protecting and preserving the creation—something scripture calls us to do. Of course, what all these people mean when they call me a liberal is that in matters political, I want to bring about change—especially change in which government programs are employed and government authority is increased. And in matters religious, they...