• Poetry - Psychology

    Piercing the Clouds of Unknowing: Ciona Rouse’s “Red-Shouldered Hawk”

    March 30, 2024 - By 

    The spiritually inclined 20th century psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of “synchronicity” is in the driver’s seat with this post. After I began assembling another selection for this blog’s “Brilliant Songs” series, I thought the better of ignoring the long-deceased Dr. Jung’s clear message to me across space and time to veer over into the poetry realm instead. Perhaps I should explain. My blogging friend over at Loren Webster.net is a longtime birder whose post the other day featured, among other winged creatures, the gorgeous portrait of the red-shouldered hawk that you see below. After admiring its fierce, self-possessed bearing before…

  • History - Photography - Politics/Culture

    Photojournalist James Nachtwey: Pictures Worth All the Views a Heart Can Bear

    March 20, 2024 - By 

    So much suffering. Catastrophe upon catastrophe, really, the long chronicle of humanity’s vast inhumanity and indifference to our fellow humans a kind of psychosis draped in the flags of country, religion, revolution, and perhaps the most fundamental, reptilian attachment of all: greed. We want to look away, of course, the poet having long ago told us we “cannot bear very much reality.” In truth, it is natural, and human, and necessary, to carry on so the world’s accumulated misery does not plunder our own capacity for the joy and love and yes, frivolity and ease that should also be everyone’s…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    Alexei Navalny Yields Not to Temptation…Can It Inspire the World?

    March 10, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    State Marries Church At the Alabama Supreme Court

    March 3, 2024 - By 

    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…