Attending a memorial service yesterday for a longtime friend of Mary’s gone too young, I beheld at the subsequent wake in a spacious social hall a looping video of still images from Peter’s life, scores of them showing endearing portraits of him paired sometimes individually with his son or daughter, other times with both of them, still others with his wife and children as a family unit. All of the photos collectively, in the spirit of this cold gray December day dedicated to honoring one man’s life, exuding the sweep, the presence, the intrinsic and undeniable power, the wide magisterial…
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A thought experiment: Your next door neighbor has always been a menace, beady-eyed with a seemingly permanent scowl that suggests a profound dislike and distrust of the world. The world, of course, has always repaid him in kind. You are certain that previously, he has stolen a number of expensive pieces of equipment and tools you kept in a shed at the back of your property, but you were never able to successfully see a legal claim through to fruition. Then one day you’re sitting down to breakfast when you see him and his sons descend upon your home with…
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It’s that crazy bouncing football called “predicting the future” all over again on the world stage, every player on the field chasing it amidst a muddy squall, the ball slithering and sliding just beyond everyone’s grasp. Thought you had it, until you didn’t, and there it goes again… How diabolical of the game’s founders to make the ball such a pointed, often unmanageable mess that keeps eluding a firm grasp! So Marjorie Taylor Greene makes a months-long, conspicuous, two-issue policy break with the president whom she continues to insist she loves. But on these issues of Israel’s pitiless destruction and…
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With some 64% of its population self-identifying as Christian for the 2020 census, the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 Christian populations of the world. But once the camera pans out from the tiny countries comprising that list (Romania, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, et al) the picture changes significantly. Partly owing to its relatively large population (331 million in 2020) and partly to its history of being settled heavily by those fleeing religious persecution, the U.S. leads the world in the gross number of Christians. Its 64% of the U.S. translates to 213 million people, easily outdistancing Brazil at…
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Sometimes, as the weekdays click by like a train churning thunka thunka purposeful yet deceptive, the sum of its sheer doggedness depositing me with unexpected speed on yet another Friday with no coalescence, no particular object of attention bobbing to the top from the background sea of ideas for this page, I yield to the steadfast gravitational pull of those near-and-always-dear, almost interchangeable twins: poetry (with its inherent music), or music (yep, with its poetry). No matter that the world seems going to ruin (hasn’t it always been so?), its cruel tempests both natural and human descending with oppressive regularity…
