Ken Frank

What a milestone! Recently my wife and I had the privilege of attending a family celebration for my parents' 60th wedding anniversary. For several weeks my sisters and wife secretly planned a party to honor our parents as they approached six decades together. On a Saturday night at the home of one of my sisters we gathered from near and far to recognize this achievement with lively conversation, food and presents.

Last night I was watching a baseball game on television and decided at 9 pm to quickly turn to Larry King Live on CNN to see who his guests would be for the show. Instead of Larry I found Wolf Blitzer delivering a breaking news story about a disaster in Minnesota.

By a coincidence of history, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born the same day--February 12, 1809. Last week marked their birth bicentennial. These history-making, world-changing men from two very different environments effected major revisions in thinking which, for better or worse, have shaped much of our modern Western culture.

Each year in January our community holds a ceremony commemorating religious freedom in America.  My wife and I have attended several of these memorials over the years.  They are celebrated here because it was in January, 1777 that Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason, George Wythe and Thomas Ludwell Lee met at Weedon's Tavern in Fredericksburg, Virginia to discuss and eventually draft The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.  Only six months earlier, the 13 American Colonies had declared independence from Britain.