The Kentucky Kernel was a powerful, even transformative experience for me. Two years as a staffer there set my course in life. Though I...

Def Leppard. The boys from Sheffield had experienced their meteoric rise during the years I was a young parent and still in the church –...

90125 had revived Yes from cold, grim death – not only keeping them alive, but supercharging with more energy and spectrum than they’d...

This one, like Nik Kershaw and Mr. Mister, might baffle and even disappoint many of my musician friends. But in 1986, I was living alone...

In 1982, I became a daddy with the birth of my son Steve. And a new phase of musical life began. I might quibble over my parents’...

Throughout the Sixties, I was growing up in Garden Springs, a suburb of west Lexington, Kentucky – in a church-music-only home. During...

Surrounded by hissing Gorn on the horizon, we huddled behind the thermocrete battlements, phasers and photon grenades at the ready as the...

I have no clear memory of a time when I didn’t love books. I remember reading Green Eggs and Ham aloud, cover to cover, for my...

Our family’s celebration of the Nativity echoes as one of the happiest components of my otherwise emotionally patchwork childhood. Not so...

Owing to the title of this book, I suppose it’s only fair that I actually discuss beer, at least in passing. I was never much of a fan...

It would have been the mid-Seventies, but I can’t pin it down much more closely than that. I was at our family’s ancestral farm in Piqua,...

I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian world, an extended community of conservative middle-class families that took very seriously the...

Tony Campolo’s book A Reasonable Faith had arrived two years after I’d heard him speak in Gatlinburg, at the Christian Student Fellowship...

Me (at keys) and Bob Holzner (on drums) and Keith Lloyd (on guitar) There was one bright spot in particular during the Highland...

I’ve presented my own credentials above, and have stressed that this book is about the future – the training of the next generation as it...

So I’m in the car and my two sons, Steve and Trey, are in the back seat. “The Federated States of Micronesia are actually 607 small...

It’s essential, of course, to think seriously about the challenges your young nerds will face, stacking up against the world’s...

We must stress, from the outset, that to be a nerd is not an entirely learned skill. Nerds occur in nature: Gentoo penguins use D&D-style...

Then again... Could Batman do a credible job of being me? Bear with me, here, I’m perfectly serious: can we ask whether Batman could pass...

It is natural, I think my Gentle Reader will agree, for any dad to want to be his kids’ hero. And, of course, when dad is a nerd, he has...