[morning]

WBC (White Blood Cell) is 9.58 – back in the normal range, but will, of course, overshoot tomorrow. Platelets are 81 (normal range 150 – 450). I feel good and took a few spins around the ward this morning after breakfast. As I noted yesterday, my blood has tested positive for a bacterial infection. They have not positively identified what bacteria it is, but the antibiotics that I’m taking should keep it at bay. There is a good possibility that they will have to remove the port-a-cath – I’m hoping not since it is such a convenience and lets me avoid getting stuck so much.

The weather in Stow is pretty bad, so Mo will not be visiting today. On the positive side, Miranda gets a snow-day. She went to see the “Chronicles of Narnia” yesterday with her friend Hadley and really enjoyed the movie. It’s on my must see list when I get out of here. I remember enjoying the books tremendously as a child. If there were any obvious Christian overtones to the stories, I don’t think I noticed them. When all is said and done, the symbolism of self-sacrifice and rebirth is actually not uniquely Christian anyway. I am sure that C.S. Lewis was writing from the heart, and if that happened to be a Christian heart, then so be it.

This touches on an area that I would dearly love to see changed in US.

Education

I would dearly love to see public schools permitted to teach religious studies as a legitimate subject. It’s clearly important in understanding society, and faith is part of people’s make-up. Outlawing faith from public education is self-defeating. What has happened by banning it from public education is that religion in schools has become a rallying point for the religious right, much like the well-intentioned but ill-executed Roe v. Wade decision. The left asks too much sometimes – would it not have been better, for example, if Ralph Nader had not run in 2000. I wonder what a Gore presidency would have been like. We have nothing to fear from the teaching of religion in schools, so long as it is taught in the spirit of true inquiry. As I have written earlier, it is only when religion becomes a wall and stifles dialog that anyone has to worry; and when I say anyone, I include members of other faiths, as well as atheists.