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Dear Friends: I remember my first grade days in a two-room schoolhouse in New Berlin when the area was still more pasture than the parking lot. Every morning, school started with all of us standing at attention next to our desks, right hands over our hearts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I suspect most of…

Dear Friends: In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase and commissioned the Lewis & Clark expedition to explore our newly acquired territory, which doubled the size of our country. Jefferson’s vision created a land of liberty that stretched from sea to shining sea. This year, we celebrate the bicentennial of those events. The…

Dear Friends: As we come to this season of Thanksgiving, we give thanks that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. These words are, of course, so familiar to us because they are taken from the final line of our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. These words have…

Dear Friends, It seems almost impossible to believe that ten years ago this month we sent our first Thanksgiving greeting. At that time, we had no idea this would become a tradition, nor did we realize it would evolve into an annual reminder of our blessed heritage. In that first letter of 1995, we provided…

Dear Friends, The Liberty Bell is one of the most famous visible symbols of freedom in our nation’s history. It was used to announce the first public reading of our Declaration of Independence and celebrated the 100th anniversary of President George Washington’s birth. After the Civil War, it was sent on tour throughout the South…

Dear Friends, As we are bombarded daily by the political “wisdom” of the presidential candidates about the character of our individual and national life, we all would do well to consider the Thanksgiving thoughts of a man who became President, without being elected to office. He was a man of destiny. Born to a family…

Dear Friends, It was a time of serious stock market losses, deep disappointment over greed and selfishness in high places, and palpable national anxiety over the economic days to come. No, we’re not talking about the Fall of 2008, but the Fall of 1933. It was in that year that the newly elected president, Franklin…

Although the time and date of the first American thanksgiving observance may be uncertain, there is no question but that this treasured custom derives from our Judeo-Christian heritage… A band of settlers arriving in Maine in 1607 held a service of thanks for their safe journey, and twelve years later settlers in Virginia set aside…

Dear Friends and Family, It was 20 years ago this year that a low-orbit telescope was launched from the earth by Space Shuttle Mission STS-31. At the time there were modest hopes that a new telescope operating outside the confines of earth’s atmosphere would offer us a slightly better view of the cosmos and what…

Dear Friends, Just two days after the horrendous events of 9/11 at the World Trade Center in New York City, a construction worker approached a Catholic priest standing among the smoking ruins, “Father, do you want to see God’s house?” he asked. “Look over there.”* Father Brian Jordan squinted across the tons of twisted rubble…