Trust is an astonishing thing. Think of relationships of all kinds--siblings, parents, spouses, friends, the relationship we have with our bosses or employees, and even the reliance we have on government agencies, on teachers, police, doctors—and our expectations of drivers in traffic. All of these and countless other relationships are based on trust. The plaintive words of Blanche [...]
In the New Oxford Review headlines today, Pope Francis is reported to have said that money is the “new idolatry”. I couldn’t help thinking what was new about that. Preachers of all sorts have said that ever since I can remember. “You cannot serve both God and mammon” is a Scripture we all must have heard [...]
This is a photo, sent by a friend, of a gathering for prayer in Washington today. The gathering was called by Franklin Graham in an appeal to people to pray for our country. You probably won’t see it on the news. There was no violence, just prayer.
These past six months I have lived in isolation. No Mass, no shopping, no volunteer work, no social life. I am old, I have a serious respiratory illness for which I take a daily medication that suppresses the immune system. According to medical advice, I shouldn’t go anywhere public unless really necessary. A neighbor shops for [...]
The news is horrifying. I would never have thought the United States could be in such disarray, such violent disarray. I lived through the sixties, but it wasn’t like this. Protests were actually protests and not riots, no real violence, no arson, no killing. And most important, no willful disobedience on the part of elected city [...]
I used to teach at a high school in a small, isolated rural town in Georgia. I arrived there already in my forties and already formed as an adult, not really subject to the formative process that I would have undergone if I’d been a new young teacher. People who visited there said it was like [...]
A recent issue of The College Fix reported an article from the Conference of College Composition and Communication in which five professors called for “black linguistic justice” and an end to the “white supremacy of standard English.” The article reported was titled: “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” The writers wanted to “decolonize [...]
Ms. Ann E.’s response to my post against capital punishment poses a theological argument to my own point of view. If this were a debate, she might be accused of “cherry-picking” sources, but it isn’t. In any case, a personal moral position must always yield to a theological one, and so I yield. But on July [...]
Among those who read my post Against Capital Punishment, reactions were varied, but only in their disagreement. No one agreed with me. Some pointed to the most heinous crimes imaginable and asserted vigorously that such crimes deserved death, pointing out that the unbearable outrage is only mitigated by a death sentence. Others were against capital punishment, [...]
I’m opposed to capital punishment. First, obviously, thou shalt not kill. Then, there’s the parable of the wheat and the weeds. (Leave the weeds; otherwise, you’ll hurt the wheat.) Put differently, if you destroy the bad, you destroy the good along with it. (Thank you, Nathaniel Hawthorne.) But there’s another reason, broader and deeper. I’ve noticed [...]