Category Religion

So many fine memories and testimonials to the spirit of former President Jimmy Carter this past week. The entire nearly three-hour service and many individual clips can be viewed on You Tube from a number of sources. For my money, a touching eulogy from his good friend and foe, former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter vanquished in the 1976 election, may have topped the list.

Ford, of course, is now dead 19 years, but in a pact made between him and Carter long before, they agreed to write eulogies for each other’s funerals, with the survivor delivering the other man’s himself, and the first-deceased arranging for a family member (in this case, Ford’s son Steve) to do the honors of reading it into the record when the survivor finally met his end.

Two archrivals in a hard-fought contest for the most powerful position in the world, out of which came a mutually respectful, lifelong friendship, tinged with pla...

“For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives. She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats its farrow. Thus she unites the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity...

My older (by three years) brother will have been gone 14 years this September, felled shortly after he retired at age 62 from a rare, always fatal brain syndrome known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of and miss his presence in my life.

Fortunately, he pops up in my dreams intermittently, always in some strange circumstance (dreams being what they are), but often gratifying nevertheless for the touchpoint they add up to, the real-seeming encounter in which he is alive to me for those moments, moving once again through space and time as a physical presence—until I wake up.

I’ve written here before about the often riotous imaginings of the dream world, the caution against trying too hard to drag them into our current waking life via some great literal “meaning” we can apply to become better, happier persons, all the wiser for our visitations from the Great B...

It was with a mixture of respect, awe, and incomprehension that I met the news of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s decision to return home in January 2021 to face near certain arrest and imprisonment at the hands of his nemesis, the dictator Vladimir Putin.

Navalny had been in Berlin, where he had endured a long hospital recovery after all evidence pointed to Putin’s security force having poisoned him the previous August with a chemical nerve agent.

Such attacks have been almost standard operating procedure for Putin, used repeatedly to eliminate or at the very least severely debilitate any antagonists whom he decides have drawn enough support from the Russian people to pose a threat to his rule.

If we applied (Jesus’s example) to Navalny’s martyrdom, we’d liken him to ‘paying’ for our own sins of indifference, ignorance, and cowardice in failing to work as hard and risk as much as he did...

The mid-February decision by the Alabama Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling and allow a wrongful death lawsuit to proceed against a hospital that left an in vitro fertilization facility unsecured, leading to the breakage of frozen human embryos conceived and stored in the laboratory, hit like another howitzer in the long-running war over abortion rights.

There were two stunning aspects to the case that set the commentariat wires buzzing.

One was the court’s determination that embryos, conceived in a petri dish meetup of sperm and eggs, gestated for 5-7 days and then frozen for later implantation into a womb, meet all the criteria of human children while in that frozen state.

Plenty to talk about there—including the fact that such an embryo, called a “blastocyst,” is comprised of between 100 to 120 cells, totaling one-tenth of a millimeter. (A millimeter is ...