DeWrite Blog

Roy Claxton Acuff was born September 15, 1903, in Maynardville, Tennessee. The Acuffs are an old and proud family that traces its roots back to French soldiers who accompanied William the Conqueror of Normandy on his 1066 invasion of England and then participated in the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries. Roy Acuff's parental grandfather, Corum Acuff, was a Union soldier during the Civil War who later had a distinguished career in the Tennessee General Assembly. Roy's father, Neil Acuff, was a lawyer and postmaster who was ordained as a minister and became the pastor of the local Maynardville Baptist Church; Roy's mother, Ida Carr, was a homemaker.

Acuff's father was a skilled fiddle player, and as a child Roy Acuff played the mouth harp and the harmonica and sang in the church choir. Although he was not an especially talented or passionate musician as a boy, Acuff nevertheless insisted that music–his father's fiddle playing in particular–made a lasting impress…

I work as an actuarial consultant, so my days vary greatly. In the past several months, I've traveled to New Jersey, Indianapolis, Las Vegas and London, and I have trips coming up to Hartford and New York. On those days, I'm typically working for a specific client at their office or visiting some of my colleagues in other Deloitte offices.

Today, I'm working in my office in Chicago. So far today, I've researched the applicable accounting rules and written a report for a client who's acquiring a small life insurance company; provided guidance over the phone to a colleague regarding the audit of an insurance company; attended an in-house training session on the modeling of life insurance reserves; worked on a spreadsheet model to do financial projections for a client; and worked on developing some materials for a committee on which I serve. All of those activities are representative of the various facets of my job—research, written communications, verbal communication…

Actualism is a widely-held view in the metaphysics of modality. To understand the thesis of actualism, consider the following example. Imagine a race of beings — call them ‘Aliens’ — that is very different from any life-form that exists anywhere in the universe; different enough, in fact, that no actually existing thing could have been an Alien, any more than a given gorilla could have been a fruitfly. Now, even though there are no Aliens, it seems intuitively the case that there could have been such things. After all, life might have evolved very differently than the way it did in fact. For example, if the fundamental physical constants or the laws of evolution had been slightly different, very different kinds of things might have existed. So in virtue of what is it true that there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none, and when, moreover, nothing that exists in fact could have been an Alien?

To answer this question, a philosopher should try to identify the special featur…

The theme of God's visitation and universal offer of salvation through Christ is first expressed in the Gospel of Luke through Zechariah, and Simeon when he saw the Child Jesus in the Temple, "a light for revelation to the Gentiles and glory. The traditional promise of a Savior for all of humanity is fulfilled in Christ, who desires salvation and all Gentiles. There is a narrative unity to Luke and Acts, for the mission of Jesus in Luke and his disciples in Acts is to carry out the "Purpose of God," a concept expressed in Luke which tells the people of Capernaum that "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose". Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are key to the description of the history and mission of the early Church. The Apostles are guided throughout Acts by the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit to carry out God's Plan. The Acts of the Apostles is an exciting narrative and …