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Frederick Niedner

Frederick A. Niedner is a professor of Theology and former Chair of the Theology Department at Valparaiso University. His ongoing work in biblical theology focuses …Read More

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Niedner: The good and bad of living 150 years

“The first person to live to 150 is alive today,” declares a current billboard near O’Hare Airport. Below, in smaller letters, a major financial company offers assistance at planning for longer retirements. Perhaps because the journey that took me past that advertisement would end in …

Those with the guns must be the most scared

Players and fans alike fought back tears as schoolmates of children slaughtered in the Newtown massacre sang “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl last weekend. What did the tears mean? And what signal did those who planned this moment wish to send? That the …

Niedner: When athletes became heroes, the plot lines changed

Like many baseball fans raised west of the Mississippi, I lost my first real hero this week. We knew of Mantle and Williams, and our dads told us about Ruth and Gehrig. But until the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California in 1957, …

Fred Niedner: Sports often another version of David and Goliath

“Sometimes Goliath stomps all over David,” mused a Notre Dame fan quoted in one of Tuesday’s anguished attempts to explain Alabama’s dominance in the BCS championship. The plot line this analogy conjures up works well around here. When a local underdog challenges a distant, hulking …

As in biblical times, we seem all too ready to sacrifice our children

This Christmas season, more than any other I’ve witnessed, should have included observances of a holy day that passed Friday with little notice even among churches. For 1,600 years, Christians have observed Dec. 28 as the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” The “innocents” commemorated on …

Niedner: Hard to find time to make things holy when sales call

As surely as December follows November, right-thinking critics among us have ramped up their annual lament over the secularization of Christmas. A slick publication that arrived this week decried Black Friday’s encroachment on Thanksgiving, the triumph of “Jingle Bells” over Advent’s penitent tones, and the …

No matter the dessert, be thankful for the company you eat with

Tradition will pretty much dictate the guest lists and menus many of us will enjoy during the annual season of feasting we’ll enter in these next days. It goes without saying that most who can afford it will sit down to a meal of turkey …

Thank goodness it will all be over soon

By this time next week we will have fallen further into the clutches of a crypto-Maoist operative hell-bent on driving our nation into a state of totalitarian perdition, or we will have sold ourselves into the hands of same plutocrats whose inept policing and criminal …

Niedner: Tales of truth-tellers, and those who speak less than truth

It may no longer surprise us when one of our heroes falls from grace and becomes a cautionary tale, but that doesn’t make it easy to watch. Plenty among us truly wanted, perhaps even needed, to trust Lance Armstrong as he consistently and assertively denied …

Niedner: Remaining optimistic about our planet’s future

Color me worried, although you might not want to get too close. My clothes may yet smell of the smoke that filled the beautiful valley in Washington’s Cascade Mountains where I attended a conference last week. In a hikers’ and photographers’ paradise, we mostly heeded …

Niedner: The world’s oldest story told again by a wrong number

My telephone number differs by one digit from several local business lines, so at our house we routinely handle wrong number calls and occasionally help the dazed and confused to reach their intended parties. When I answered the phone absent-mindedly one evening last week with …

  • Solution needed for wasted food problems

    Like many children of my generation, I sometimes finished a meal to avoid shame, not satisfy hunger. “Think of the starving children in India or Africa who would love to have what’s on your plate,” my parents chided. Occasionally we replied, “Take it! Wrap it …Read More

  • Niedner: Are we becoming the Divorced States of America?

    While viewing “Hope Springs” at a movie theater last Sunday, absorbed in the marital woes of Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as they play a couple sitting tensely on opposite ends of marriage counselor Steve Carell’s office couch, I couldn’t help thinking about the …Read More

  • Niedner: Fear motivates and fear-mongering pays

    Soon after James Holmes sprayed a Colorado cinema audience with bullets, authorities announced that this deadly rampage did not appear to be an act of terrorism. The tone of the statement suggested that listeners should find this reassuring. If a foreign national or some subversive …Read More

  • Never a dull moment when we generate our own scripts

    Imagine 400 people of all ages gathered at dusk on the 4th of July in an old high school gymnasium, the kind that doubles as an auditorium with a stage on one end. To the accompaniment of Sousa marches played on a boombox, a projector …Read More

  • Niedner: Healing is a gift to give again

    Few things astound me more than the capacity of living things to heal. Almost as astonishing, of course, is the number and variety of wounds that make healing necessary. Each of our lives begins with a cutting loose that requires healing and leaves an obvious …Read More

  • Let’s hope there’s a planet for everyone, even Texans

    A recent ad for unusual, out-of-print books lists several science fiction classics, including a 1958 novel, “A Planet for Texans” by H. Beam Piper. Set in the late-21st century, it describes life on a distant planet to which the entire population of Texas has moved …Read More

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