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Some years ago, a friend said he could not understand the ongoing popular interest in John Adams and his descendants. Of that prominent American family, he said, “They were all smart, but sick.” Brilliance and eccentricity (if not madness) do seem to pair together, and many of the Adams men were no exception. Such patterns fascinated [...]
A friend’s husband is being fitted with a prosthetic leg, his natural one lost to a lifelong scourge of Diabetes. Another is being fitted for a denture for all her upper teeth, scheduled for extraction when the denture is ready. It will be put in place while she is under anesthetic for the multiple extractions. It’s [...]
Featured on the cover of the April, 1979, issue of Guideposts magazine was an actor, Ricardo Montalban. In 1945 Norman Vincent Peale founded Guideposts as an ecumenical outlet for inspirational true stories by people from all walks of life. A Protestant pastor, Peale might be best known for his book, The Power of Positive Thinking. In [...]
…get a lot of bad press in modern times. In political and academic venues, writers and speakers are chastised for abstracting concrete events or conditions. An example or two may be in order: A political science teacher, or perhaps a history teacher, abstracts an event like war; a student may object to the teacher’s non-mention of [...]
It seems that “cradle” Catholics are more interested in conversion stories than converts are. Perhaps they enjoy the experience of seeing the faith in which they were born and reared affirmed, perhaps it strengthens their own fidelity. As a convert, I’m not as interested, though I have noticed from time to time that initial conversion most [...]
Department store magnate Harry Selfridge said, “There’s no fun like work,” but probably most people would disagree. The daily monastic routine can help a monk appreciate the daily secular treadmill of a married man who gets up, shaves, showers, gets dressed, and goes off to a job he once thought he was just the man cut [...]
Benjamin Franklin called my ancestors “Palatine boors.” It was nothing personal, of course, since he was worried about all the German-speaking peoples settling in the British colonies along the eastern seaboard, especially Pennsylvania. In 1683, about five miles west of Philadelphia, a special enclave, Germantown, was set up for them, but they were spreading farther afield. [...]
Some of my earliest memories are those of primitive country people. You might say “superstitious” except that so many of those beliefs have proven true. One of them is an ability to take the heat away from another’s burn. If one of us children burned ourselves, perhaps on a hot kettle, we ran to my grandmother, [...]