Of course there is more to come from the Democratic Convention, regarding their platform and the significant differences between Barak Obama and John McCain. But if last night was to be both a paean to the Democratic Party's rich history of liberalism and a corrective to the negative attacks on Michelle Obama, then you can consider it a success.

I'm not sure how heartless you would have to be to not be moved by Senator Ted Kennedy's appearance and his courageous determination to be back to the Senate in January. Or to find fault with the story of Michelle Obama's family, her life and her commitment to service.

I'm having a hard time figuring this one out:

For a couple of decades now, we've been saying that what's most important in our leaders are character, a commitment to family, to community and to faith...

OK, I'm going to trust you. Click on the link below first to see another way we are helping to stock the pool of underclass in our society.

We may be able to do something about the underclass that we are creating in this country if we didn't keep adding to it.

We add to it in a number of ways. One way is the way in which the formerly incarcerated are dealt with. Let out of prison with employers loathe to hire them, restricted leasing policies in apartment complexes, we have pretty much cut them loose to return to their neighborhoods of origin where the social pathologies tend to be worse than when they went into prison.

But adjunct to that re-entry population is another class of formerly incarcerated known as 'exonerees': a demographic of the prison population released because of eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, government misconduct and most dramatically, advances in genetic science - known as DNA evidence - which has proven them to be innocent of the crimes for which they have been convicted.

"...a dark age is not a one-dimensional time of unending disintegration. Rather, it is a distinct turning point in history, a period of flux that often produces great technological and other gains yet ultimately results in a declining civilization and a desert like spell of collective forgetting."

Jackson's premise is that our technologically saturated culture is eroding our capacity to focus and engage in reflective thought regarding just about anything. In the name of progress we may be sliding down a slippery slope with our BlackBerrys, email, and PowerPoint explanations of complex subject matter.

Watching Rick Warren moderate the Saddleback's Civil Forum on the Presidency, was extremely interesting and it was interesting because of Rick Warren.

Warren is the evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California and seems to have found the key to being religiously conservative without being obnoxious. He also found a way to host the forum without getting in the way of the forum. His questions were challenging, but present value issues, as wedge issues the way most Christian conservatives have for more than a quarter of a century. I'm not a Rick Warren 'fan'. I do think that he is a thoughtful, strategic pastor whose perspective on the Christian faith, and contemporary church, offers much that is of value to the church at large. I don't agree with the obvious perspective from which some of the questions were asked. But he asked those questions in ways in which they could be heard and in ways that made you look forward to hearing the answers.