Category Archives: Jim Langcuster

Facing the Vacissitudes of Life with a Teenaged Brain

Posted on February 22, 2024 by Jim Langcuster

I got into an interesting discussion recently with two men who were approximately my age dealing with this question: If somehow each of us could travel in a time machine some 45 years back in time to advise our younger … Continue reading →

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A Remarkable Fifty-Year-Old Time Capsule

Posted on December 26, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

“It’s a very Catholic film…” This statement, which was offered in this extensive and deeply thoughtful review, pretty much sums up “The Exorcist,” which was released in 1973. It was indeed very Catholic. Yet, that was not the impression that … Continue reading →

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Boundless, Heedless and Puerile

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

I read stuff like this and count myself fortunate that I grew up as a late boomer in the Appalachian South and whose formative influences were a saint of a mother with a simple, straightford evangelical faith, a strong-willed, cynical, … Continue reading →

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That Mongrelized Language

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

One of the more clever memes currently making its rounds within social media depicts two elite Romans discussing how a mongrelized language spoken on the periphery of the Empire would replace Latin and Greek as the de facto language of … Continue reading →

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Living Authentically in Our Dense Human Exoskeleton

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

I have spent a lot of time lately reflecting on the way we perceive existence around us and the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s idea of authenticity, relating this to my own idea of our living in what I … Continue reading →

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A Sublime Gestalt

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

I ran across this depiction by renowned scholar Bart Ehrmann, an expert on early Christian origins. There are plenty of ministers particularly Mainline Protestant ministers in the United States, who attended first-rate seminaries but who, largely as a consequence of … Continue reading →

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The Windmills of Our Minds

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

A few of you know how fond I am of this song, and part of it stems from what it says about the human condition. As I like to say, we are hotwired chimpanzees: We’re a species that stumbled over … Continue reading →

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Why I’m Remaining United Methodist

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Jim Langcuster

For better or worse, I am going to weigh in on the current turmoil in the United Methodist Church. For the sake of clarity, I’ll state up front that that I grew up in the Southern Baptist faith but became … Continue reading →

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A Lesson from Gorbachev’s Legacy

Posted on September 10, 2022 by Jim Langcuster

This Tweet (press it to expand it) raises a fascinating point about human embeddedness. Briefly put, our distant hominid forebears improvised a survival strategy that ultimately resulted in the fusion of several things: technology, language, writing, math and science, to … Continue reading →

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Prefabricated Socialist Promises

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Jim Langcuster

I am not a socialist. In fact, I have read enough of the old Austrian School pro-market economists to be adamantly opposed to socialism. Yet Sociology was one of my undergrad majors and I have always been fascinated with understanding … Continue reading →

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