• Poetry

    Rhyming Hope and History
    With Seamus Heaney’s “Doubletake”

    August 29, 2020 - By 

    The late Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) sounds like the Buddha himself in the first line of his poem, “Doubletake,” published in 1991. “Human beings suffer,” it begins, and we suspect we are in for it now, another journey through melancholia borne of downtroddenness as only the Irish can express it. The second line elaborates on one form that suffering takes: “they torture one another…” And so they do. The poem’s 39 lines go on for a couple more stanzas in that vein, which you can read in full below. But fear not: Heaney doesn’t stay submerged in the dark depths for long.…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    The Dems Get Some Religion

    August 23, 2020 - By 

    So at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, we are reminded that Joe Biden will allow “No religion. No anything.” Not only that, but he will “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God.” Against God—dear me! Whom he will “hurt.” Poor God! We had better buck that boy up, send him a condolence or “I’ve been thinking of you” card to restore whatever confidence has been shaken by the Biden campaign’s assault against his very person. Cheesh, for a “Sleepy Joe” whose doddering, demented, cognitively declining ways have become the butt of Republican Party campaign ads, it’s a rather remarkable feat to be able…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Saving the Caterpillars

    August 18, 2020 - By 

    I have taken to spotting the sudden August profusion of caterpillars making their way across the park path before the sun makes it over the trees. Danger is everywhere, a veritable Omaha Beach, but with unwitting enemies. A steady fusillade of pedestrians, drivers and cyclists go about their morning through the park, unknowingly poised to crush the hapless creatures in but one more episode of natural, deadly roulette. Deliberating hardly at all in my mission of mercy, I begin scooping up first one, then another and another caterpillar and depositing them on the grass three feet and an eternity away,…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #15:
    Bill Morrissey’s “Birches”

    August 15, 2020 - By 

    There are songs you hear in passing, once, twice, five times, before you notice your ears have been perking up a bit more on each listen, and you finally ask yourself, “So just who and what is that, anyway?” Other songs gobsmack you on first hearing, leaving you speechless and sputtering, mainlining a message and melody like an electric current, perfectly wedding a voice with a lyric and painting a picture with such crystalline detail and depth of feeling as to leave you shook to your core, knowing you just heard something great, and will want to hear it a…

  • Film/TV - Religion

    Devotion, Betrayal, Conformity, Freedom: Netflix’s “Shtisel”      

    August 9, 2020 - By 

    I know a little bit about Judaism in general but next to nothing about its Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox versions, about which Jews themselves have huge differences of opinion. (And part of what I know about Judaism in general is how rarely Jews hesitate in sharing those opinions…) That’s a major reason why, as a lapsed Catholic Unitarian Universalist with mystical Christian-Buddhist sensibilities and an always attentive ear for the common core of religious practice, I was enchanted recently to stumble upon “Shtisel,” an Israeli television production that ran there for two 12-episode seasons beginning in 2013 and concluded in 2016.…