The death of a man who brought so many, including my own family, so much wholesome laughter should not pass without notice here. Don Knotts was most famous for playing “Barney Fife,” the awkward and nervous deputy to TV’s Sheriff Andy Griffith. The Andy Griffith Show is an important piece of American culture, an iconic monument to television — and to humor that was never coarse and never mean.

Feminist writer and pioneer Betty Friedan died Saturday on the very day she turned 85 years of age. Her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, sparked a social revolution and became a manifesto for the rising movement later called feminism.

The news from Memphis brings to a close one of the greatest pulpit ministries of our times. Dr. Adrian Rogers died early this morning after a brave fight against cancer. Few men have left such an impact on a church, a denomination, and the larger world.

Kyle Lake, pastor of University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, died Sunday after being electrocuted while performing a baptism. According to the Associated Press, UniversityBaptistChurch Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal when electrocuted, said Jamie Dudley, wife of UBC community pastor Ben Dudley and a business adminstrator at the church. The woman Lake was baptising was not injured, Jamie Dudley said.

In his massive work, A History of the American People, British historian Paul Johnson observed that American history raises some of the most fundamental questions of meaning and morality. The first question Johnson identified was whether a nation can “rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?”

The death of Pope John Paul II brings one of the Roman Catholic Church’s longest papal reigns to an end and closes the last chapter on one of the most significant lives of our times. By any measure, John Paul II was one of the most influential figures on the world scene, leading over a billion Roman Catholics worldwide and exercising a significant influence on world affairs during some of the most tumultuous decades of the 20th century.