• Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Fever Dream (and a Dog’s Relentless Love)

    March 26, 2017 - By 

    It’s a dream, but the images are sharp as daylight. I’m on one of our well-traveled byways, nearing a crosswalk on Summerfield Road. Shenzi is about six feet out on her leash, and she inexplicably ambles out into the road a few feet before I am there, disregarding all her training. I pull back on the leash and she is a little slow to respond. Then I see cars are dangerously closer and she is still out a few feet on the roadway. Now I pull more emphatically on the leash, but Shenzi, again inexplicably, digs in. I easily overpower her, but…

  • Music - Religion

    Iris Dement Takes on the Philosophers

    March 14, 2017 - By 

      *** Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go When the whole thing’s done But no one knows for certain And so it’s all the same to me I think I’ll just let the mystery be *** “Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no decision, whether positive or negative, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumination of transcendence we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with respect to which it can now be asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.” —From Martin Heidegger’s essay, “On the Essence…

  • Politics/Culture

    God Bless Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

    March 11, 2017 - By 

    In 2009, if President Barack Obama had let it all go—allowed the banks to fail, GM to go out of business, the whole incipient Depression to descend as it would after the insistent anti-regulatory, tax-cutting machinations of the Bush administration reached their natural dark end—the American economy and the fortunes of its people would have gone into freefall. The suffering and dislocation would have been on a scale not seen since The Great Depression. Many conservatives at the time were advocating just that—for the country to “take its medicine,” not rely on another government bailout that reeked of a dreaded “socialism.” They wanted…