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Columnists

BOB BROWN: “Teach Us to Number Our Days”

I was healthy and fit, a proponent of physical exercise, weighed myself daily with pleasing results, known for immodesty about how formerly and regularly I ran the Virginia 10...

ROBERT L. MARONIC: Sanction Russia’s Shadow Fleet NOW

During the 2024 presidential campaign and going back to March 2023, President Trump repeatedly and...

DAWN CUSTALOW: A Mother’s Day to Remember

Mother’s Day - remembering and celebrating our mothers, not because they are or were perfect,...

FRED FIRST: Lonesome Highway: Helplessly Hoping

When we had two consecutive years of testing to compare in June of 2022, Ann...

RANDY HUFF: Know When to Hold Your Peace

“Why don't you say your piece?” I asked my friend. “It need not be public....

Meets His Intestinal Match

Last week, Roscoe the Bassett Hound, Roanoke's preeminent eating machine, consumed a foreign object, hurling our pet-centric household into a state of emergency. If...

Avatar Sets One to Thinking: What Body This? By The Reverend Barkley Thompson

It was an almost foregone conclusion.  There James Cameron sat several Sunday evenings ago, his hair more silver than it was thirteen years...

Parenting Is – Has Always Been – Tough

Has our job as parents gotten tougher than it used to be?  Did our parents have an easier job or did they do a...

Someone’s to Blame

There hasn’t been a time since the second term of Franklin Roosevelt that a President has been faced with so many critical issues at...

The Happy Chef: Snowstorm Lamb Kabobs

SNOW, SNOW, SNOW!!! We love it! We have this great big hill a few doors down from our house that is most excellent...

In Search of Wildness

Emily Dickinson was right to see that a prairie might consist of only one flower and a bee. When my childhood world was small,...