March 6, 2017, had an ominous feel about it. The day was unusually warm for March and by 11 o’clock, the wind was howling out of the southwest, gusting to 50 mph. Everyone living on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle was aware that, for three days, the National Weather Service had issued red flag warnings for this day: extreme danger of wildfires.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British scientist who holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University and the author of an intriguing book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (Crown Publishers 1999).

Below is a story Hank the Cowdog author John R. Erickson wrote 28 years ago. Western Horseman magazine ran it then and it will eventually come out in a new Erickson book, Cowboy Tales, published by Maverick Books. You’ll recognize certain Biblical echoes that John wasn’t aware of as he wrote it, and he asks whether that makes “Diary of a Bronc” a Christian story: “How can a story narrated by a horse be regarded as ‘Christian?’ Come to think of it, what is a Christian story—or movie or song or work of art?” Good question—please read on and see if you can answer it.

In 1967, during my second-year at Harvard Divinity School, I was heading toward a ministerial degree but also dabbling with the idea of becoming a famous novelist. I decided to apply for a spot in a two-semester course on fiction writing offered at Harvard College.

I don’t get it. From the time The Gilgamesh Epic was written on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, until recent times, world literature got along fine without word bombs, and so did the movie business in its first five decades.

So on this weekend of the 89th Academy Awards, I have to ask: Why do filmmakers keep using those words? You know the ones. WORLD Magazine doesn’t print them. My wife and I have a strong negative reaction to them. When Kris and I were growing up, we never heard them in our homes. We never heard them in movies or saw them in books.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there were no black-skinned people in our little Texas town. When my family made trips to Amarillo, we saw them on the streets and in the stores, but we never met them.