Fletcher Farrar

The idea of replacing Springfield High School with a $57 million new building in a cornfield on Springfield’s west side is so lame, so yesterday, so pre-Obama, that it should hardly be called an idea at all. It would be just like Springfield to build a suburban-type school just as high energy prices, the collapse […]

Untitled Document On Mother’s Day I go to church with Mom. She’s still with our old home church, Central Christian, though it’s hardly the same church I grew up in. Central has become our small town’s version of a megachurch. Over the past 20 years it has leaped enthusiastically into the contemporary-worship movement, first ditching […]

Untitled Document Punctuation and grammar, used well, can not only make us communicate better, and look better for having done so, they can also make us feel better. Commas and colons and active-voice sentences can even make us be better persons, argues Lawrence A. Weinstein in his new book, Grammar for the Soul: Using Language […]

Untitled Document Rwanda is known as a place of death, but I wish that everyone could see the life in the faces of some of its orphans. It was 14 years ago this month that the slaughter began. By the time it was over, 100 days later, some 800,000 people had been killed in an […]

Untitled Document They say that time behind bars makes criminals better at what they went in for. A gangbanger makes more gang connections, and a small-time bank robber learns from the best. The same holds true for Springfield peace activist Diane Lopez Hughes, who just got home after 45 days in the Muscogee County Jail, […]

Untitled Document The subject of hope has gotten so much press, there was bound to be a pushback. During a recent debate, our guy had to carefully explain that hope doesn’t mean there’s no struggle, but the vision of what we’re struggling for empowers the work and makes it worthwhile. His hopeless opponent knows better, […]

Untitled Document Eric Scott Volkel-Barno is a person who likes to help people. He especially likes to help people who are helping other people. A quiet person who tries to live by the motto “Speak less, help more,” he didn’t always know how to go about it. In 2005 Kres Lipscomb, his pastor at First […]

Untitled Document At a breakfast meeting with about 100 business leaders at the University of Illinois at Springfield last week the Springfield Chamber of Commerce gave its inaugural annual report on the big initiative it calls the Quantum Growth Partnership. The purpose was not only to report to the public and be accountable to the […]

Untitled Document An experienced plantsman once told me the best time to prune: “Whenever the shears are sharp.” My approach to gardening has followed a similar bent. I do what I can when I can, with what I have. That’s why I was out planting daffodil bulbs on the day before New Year’s Eve. I […]

Untitled Document It was a nice surprise to see Mike Bowman and his wife, Kim, last week on the NBC network news, testifying before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. They were on CNN and CBS as well, and newspapers across the country picked up their story. The congressional hearing and the media attention were […]

Untitled Document When Hillary Clinton scolded Barack Obama the other day in Iowa, talking about his inexperience and listing his mistakes, I saw a picture of a mother lecturing her grown son. That may not be fair, because Clinton is only 14 years older than Obama, but she is of a different generation. In his […]

Untitled Document In 1961, after a long day of working on a promotional film at New Salem, 83-year-old Carl Sandburg granted Tom Littlewood an interview about Sandburg’s old friend Henry Horner, the two-term governor of Illinois who died in 1940. “Horner was the Real Goods,” said the poet and author, who had shared with Horner […]