Today I thank the Lord for blessing me with thirty-eight revolutions around the sun. God has been so wonderful and so merciful and so kind to me, a man undeserving in every respect. Special thanks for God’s provision of a child comforter in the form of my daughter Jubilee who is traveling with me this weekend. This is the first birthday I can remember being apart from my bride.

It was my pleasure to return for the second time in five years to the Kansas state home school conference, brilliantly managed by the Middelton family. Brian and Kathy Middelton have been at it for sixteen years and are finally passing the baton to others, but do so with the blessed assurance that their highly professional work has not only set a standard of excellence for conference management, but has resulted in the blessing of many tens of thousands of Christians over the years.

My messages included “6,000 Years of Home Education and Covenant Faithfulness,” “Christian Controversies in American History,” “What’s a Girl to Do?,” and “Rebuilding a Culture of Virtuous Boyhood.” During my talk on controversies in American history, I reminded the Kansans that their community had once been ravaged by one of the most evil men in American history, John Brown, a terrorist who shot children on account of their parentage.

From Doug’s Bookshelf: The Secret Six by Otto Scott is the best book on the evil movement known as abolitionism which funded America’s first terrorist, John Brown, and did so in the name of anti-Christian Unitarianism. Christians should be aware that being anti-slavery and being anti-abolitionist were not incompatable sentiments for both Southerners and Northerners in the years leading up to the Civil War.