Ken Casillas, The Law and the Christian: God’s Light within God’s Limits (Biblical Discernment for Difficult Issues; Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 2007), 1–2, 24:

It’s funny what you remember from your childhood. Personally, I find it difficult to recall specific conversations, events, and experiences. But of all the positive things I would like to remember from my years as a missionary child in Puerto Rico, for some reason the sad story of Karl Wallenda has stayed with me. Wallenda was a German entertainer who became famous for doing extremely dangerous tightrope stunts without a safety net. His family act was dubbed the Flying Wallendas, and their signature performance was a seven-person pyramid topped by a woman standing on a chair. The Wallendas performed internationally through the middle of the twentieth century. Though the group survived catastrophes such as the 1944 Hartford circus fire, in 1962 Karl lost his son-in-law and nephew in a major fall in Detroit. Overcoming a cracked pelvis, Karl continued his death-defying stunts. At sixty-five he traversed a distance of 1200 feet above Georgia’s Tallulah Falls Gorge, doing two headstands some 700 feet in the air.

Wallenda walked for the last time at the age of seventy-three. For a promotional event, a wire was strung about 120 feet high between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Some believe the problem was the high ocean winds. The family says that some guy ropes were misconnected. Whatever the case, Karl Wallenda plunged to his death on March 22, 1978. The entertainer once said, “Life is being on the wire; everything else is just waiting.” [Read more…] about Theology on a Tightrope