Preaching Connection: 9th Commandment

The American Bar Association in its Model Rules states that “in the course of representing a client a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of material fact or law to a third person” but lawyers in fact often deliberately lie in court, and most of the time they get away with it. Suppose...

Eisenhower on the carnage in the Falaise Pocket, reported in his Crusade in Europe: ”’It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh’–formerly German soldiers who could have lived by surrender but who chose, madly, not to.’” Why were these data unfamiliar to...

“What is a ‘sentinel event’? Well, it’s not a mistaken shooting by a soldier on guard duty. It’s something awful that a hospital does to you. If a surgeon cuts off the wrong leg or sews you up with a couple of needles inside, the words ‘malpractice’ and ‘gross negligence’ may occur to you. But...

At Harvard’s Commencement in 1978 Solzhenitsyn gave a fine and measured–but also piercing–speech that indicted Western godlessness and materialism. It was very far from Fundamentalist. It never used the word God. The New York Times editorial, in comment, June 13, 1978, scored him for being sure: he is a “religious Enthusiast, sure of [his] relationship...

This article concerns the trend already in 2007 of ending even long-intimate relationships as impersonally (and, therefore, as cowardly) as possible—by text message, for example, or email, or [today] even Twitter. “The techno brush-off has offshoots, too, that relationship experts find troubling. There is the techno-AWOL breakup, where a person doesn’t answer emails or instant...

From his school days, Lyndon Baines Johnson was known for his lying. “The aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. ‘You could catch him in a lie about something and it was like he didn’t care,’ Horace Richards...

‘Dissembling is a learned response. With age and experience the facial mask can harden and become nearly impregnable. It takes a quick, surprising thrust to penetrate such practical nonchalance.”

“If falsehood, like truth, had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field . . . . A thousand paths miss the target, one goes to it.”