Times Bulletin: (Van Wert) Peony Festival Steps Into 40th Year

Nice. My dad chaired this at one time and believe me, it was a BIG deal for a little town. Floats would come from the Indy 500 to be part of the parade and of course my grandpa Shaffer, who was county truant officer at the time, kept an eye on all the kiddies (you know who you are). Heh. I even have old home movies of a couple of the parades. It was pretty impressive.

116048VAN WERT — The Peony Festival will celebrate its 40th year this weekend, June 5-7, with the theme “Blooming Colors for 40 Years.”

Van Wert was known as the peony capital of the world in the early 1900s with many local gardeners growing fields of the flower. The first Sunday in June beginning in 1902 was designated as Peony Sunday.

The community held the first Peony Festival in 1932 and continued until 1960 with some missed years during World War II and the 1950s. In 1992, the Peony Festival returned and has been celebrated each year since its resurrection.

In the early years, the festival highlight was not one, but two parades, which brought in crowds of nearly 100,000 people.

Now the festival spans three days, runs in conjunction with ArtRageous on Friday and Saturday, and offers various events that draw crowds all weekend.

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Juicy Ecumenism: The (biblical) Sex Talk: What the Church Should Be Doing

See what you think.

The Church is often branded as legalistic and puritanical with regards to this topic. I have heard it joked about, in sermons that dodiscuss the biblical context of sex, that the old church motto on the topic went as follows: “Sex is filthy. Save it for your husband.” It is this misrepresentation that leads newlyweds acclimated to church culture to feel guilt for having sex in marriage—yes, in marriage—and leads others to spurn marriage as an institution for the morally lax.

Instead of letting the confusion and misrepresentations continue, the Church needs to stand up and embrace godly sexual relations in their appropriate context, teaching its youth that God designed sex for the covenant of marriage. It needs to educate on the harmful psychological effects of passion without commitment and on the correlation of cohabitation before marriage and increased divorce rate. It needs to prevent another generation of young adults from having their moral questions answered on an online forum.

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