October 2007
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Cart and Horse and Caritas This is a follow-up to last week’s journal; I want to expand a bit on my reasons for more or less dropping out of the bitter and embittering American cultural-political debate. (My apologies if I repeat myself; I felt that I had not said all that I wanted to say.…
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Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Awesome. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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Everybody, especially Americans, should see this, although perhaps only Americans, and maybe even only Americans who have some sense of direct connection with the events, will find all fourteen hours of it engrossing, as I did. I may have something more to say about it later, but I wanted to note this bit from the…
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Going back yet again to the recent discussion of faith and doubt, here's a piece at the First Things blog, "Does Doubt Belong to Faith?", which is interesting not only for what it says but for the fact that it starts from exactly the same passages which rjp (Newman) and I (then-Cardinal Ratzinger) used in…
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Via rjp in the comments: The soul never grows old. —Sigrid Undset That's what the Berryman quote a couple of posts back points to, and as I noted there it's a datum that grows ever more real and significant to one with years. I've seen it as an observer, in my own parents and other…
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Undoubtedly something is about to happen. Or is it that something has stopped happening? Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and…
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This is #7 from John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs. Berryman was born in 1914, and is here remembering movies of roughly the late '20s. If these references were replaced with ones from the late '50s these lines would do very well as a description of a state of mind very familiar to me and, I…
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I saw and realized … that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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Goodbye to Politics and Culture Wars It’s been twenty-five years or so since I first heard someone explicitly take politics into account in his views of another person. A friend was asking me about a mutual acquaintance, saying “I’m not sure about him. He seems like a nice guy and his politics are okay, but…”…
Light On Dark Water 