On Christian Apologetics, Political Activism, and Cognitive Dissonance - A layperson's view

This post represents a departure from my usual topics, because it deals more with faith and spirituality as they concern political issues in today's world. I have touched on such topics before, just not in this blog. In the 1990's, I experienced a real epiphany when Ben and I enjoyed a tour of the Mennonite museum during a weekend getaway to Shipshewanna, Indiana. I wrote about that experience for my writer's group in an essay called "In Search of the Remnant."

Let me apologize ahead of time for this blog post and ask my readers to please bear with me because it does wander around a bit. I come from a family of geologists and paleontologists, so I tend to back away and take the long view.

I generally date the church's departure from "church-as-I-knew-it" (when I was growing up in the 50's, 60's, and early 70's) to the late 1980's and early 1990's,

Photoshop Actions, Overlays, and Textures for under Twenty-five Dollars

I keep seeing all these wonderful online ads about textures and lately, Photoshop Actions and Overlays that you can purchase and apply to your photographs to turn them into works of art. Due to cookies and other forms of internet magic, these ads keep following me around, teasing me and tempting me! The results shown in these ads look absolutely beautiful and the products seem like they'd be fun to learn. Until I see the price tag, that is. These products may or may not make my photos beautiful, but one thing for sure, they can be prohibitively expensive. So I want some certainty before I buy.