You are probably curious about why a retired Alabama circuit judge established a website!
Here is your answer:My Ideas
The felt need to publish the ideas and writings described on the Home page and this page inspired the creation of this website. But to explain how these ideas developed, I needed also to tell my story, and describe the things that caused the ideas to develop. Publishing the website enabled me the ideas several ways, including opinion editorials, laity talks and other writings and ideas that developed during my career.
My Story
In an earlier era, I would likely have written a book of memoirs. But we are into a new age. I can preserve memories electronically. My ideas are inseparable from my story, and this website allows me to describe the environment in which the ideas contained in my books developed, and the writings found on this website help to present a complete picture.
Dale's Ideas and Story
The ideas presented on this website arose in the experience of rich and full life: a birth into a two room shack in rural Macon County, Alabama at the outset of US participation in World War II, a childhood in depression-like conditions in rural Alabama; education in a very small white public school in a mostly Black county, Huntingdon College, the University of Alabama Law School; election as a Circuit Judge in a rural Alabama Circuit; strong participation in judicial education, both as student and presenter; lifelong participation in United Methodist Church activity, many opportunities as a UM Lay Speaker, service as Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church; Alumni work and service as a Trustee, including chairing the board of trustees for Huntingdon College; and intense reading in philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology and history all the while.
A Work in Progress
Please understand that this website is a work in progress. It will never be finished! None of the work is necessarily complete. In this accordion I will briefly describe and the various categories.
Human Faith Within a Conscious Biosphere
This collection of essays containing my most current ideas has been published by Bookbaby. https://store.bookbaby.com/…/human-faith-within-a…
Conscience and Command,
The original was published in 1994. https://store.bookbaby.com/…/human-faith-within-a...
The second edition, or Conscious and Command, Revisited, is a work in progress that I hope to publish. It will be both a good prologue and a good epilogue to Human Faith Within a Conscious Biosphere. It will show how my thinking has developed, and also provide an example of one of the social systems that I describe in FWCB. It will, suggest the plateau that I had reached in 1994.
My Story
I have only begun this project. I have tried to suggest the beginning of the story, and have outlined the narrative, but I hope to add much more. In summary, I was born in abject poverty, among impoverished people. They bore the poverty without complaint and enjoyed life life was good. In 1944, a school bus came to the front of our two room house, where there was no water, plumbing, electricity or telephone and picked up my older brother Wade and carried him to the public school in Shorter, Macon County Alabama. I caught the same bus to the first grade in the same school in 1948. I try to catch something of the spirit of the community in the episodes that I relate. That is the school to which Mary Christine DeBardeleben returned in about 1945. The missionary work that I describe in telling her story had not ended. The work of the Shorter Public School was excellent, and the story is worth telling, and I include that story. We got an excellent education, but in the 1960’s the little school white school in a predominantly Black county was caught up in the controversies of Civil Rights, while I was at Huntingdon College, and the University of Alabama Law School. It did not survive. But I returned to the County that gave me that education, and that is the environment that gave rise to my ideas. Its all a matter of trying to understand. And being understood. I also tell the story of my work in the United Methodist Church.
Mary Christine DeBardeleben
A work in progress. I am seeking additional information, and hope to publish a formal biography later.
Opinion Essays
Over 30 opinion essays are included. They deal with Law and Race, as well as opinions about the legal system itself and other miscellaneous topics. Most of these were originally published in the Alabama Gazette, but I am likely to add too the collection.
Laity Talks
I served as a lay speaker in the United Methodist Church for over forty years. During that time, I served as Conference Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. I had many opportunities for lay speaking. Not nearly all were written out or recorded, but a fair sampling is included here. It is possible that more will be added as I review my records. If anyone remembers a talk that I made and will remind me of if, I will look, or even reconstruct!
The following posts are samples from the various types of writing found in the menu.
A Remnant Shall Be Left
Place UMC, March 4, 1979 ISAIAH: 1:2-9: 2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. 3 The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s master’s crib: but Israel...
(13) The Cow Pen
Just across the branch and a little south of the path to Uncle Earl’s was the cow pen. It was fenced and we always “brought up” the cows at night to stay in the pen. Inside the pen was a cow shed. It was about an open shed—a trussed roof held up...
Is That All There Is?
c. 1984 He had very little to live for as he stood on the bridge at the outskirts of the city. No one could think of anything in particular to say to discourage him. He had lost his wife to cancer a few years earlier, and their only son had died before the death of...
14) Uncle Earl’s Place
The Old Segrest Homeplace Although they arrived in Macon County soon after it was ceded by the Creek Indians, I have never heard of my Segrest forebears owning any plantation. Other Segrests who were a part of the same Nineteenth Century migration...
(14) The Bethlehem Center
The thing that is remarkable about Miss Christine De Bardebelen is not that she attended The Methodist Training School and was trained for missionary work in 1910, but how she used that training. All accounts give Miss Dee credit for establishing the very first...
(15) Grandma and the rose cutting
If you went out the front door onto Uncle Earl’s front porch and looked to the right, in front of the porch and about six feet away, Grandma had a nice rose bush. It was the vine type, and was on a frame. Mama really like those roses, so Grandma gave her a...
(15) Paine College
The Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) chose Augusta Georgia for Miss Dee’s missionary work among the Blacks. Clearly, that location was chosen because Paine College was located there. Paine College had been founded in...
The Inadequacy of Legalism
There is always danger, as a society matures, that it will become hidebound in the law. An examination of the problem of legalism can also give insight into the nature and purpose of law. A major thought in comparing the New Testament to the Old Testament is the...
(16) Charles G. Gomillion
I began my detailed investigation of the life and works of Mary Christine De Bardeleben in 2018, almost fifty years after her death in 1970. First there was conversations with family members. The family vaguely remembered of hearing that from time to time...
(16) Adventures in Uncle Earl’s Barn
Uncle Earl had a barn right behind his house. We didn’t have one at the Little House, but Daddy and Uncle Earl did a lot of their farming together back in those days, so we didn’t need a barn. Our mule, Pete, stayed at Uncle Earl’s and spent nights in...