Religion
-
Hitchens vs. Chesterton The last essay by the late Christopher Hitchens appears in the March issue of The Atlantic, and I finally got around to reading it this morning. Craig Burrell has written about it here, and I'm pretty much of the same mind, though he is a little more generous to the piece than I…
-
In order to reach ourselves, to fulfill ourselves, we must take an infinite distance, which is the distance of God, because, between us and our selves, the only way to reach our selves is through the divine presence. The only way to reach others is through the divine presence. The only way to enter the…
-
Every Way We Ever Looked It's been…let me check…four weeks now since one of my daughters, the only one of our children who lives nearby, gave birth to her second child. Though it's been a month now, and though this was not the first such experience, I still find myself thinking often of the strangeness…
-
Microfascism Several weeks ago, in a comment on my post about David Bentley Hart's essay on American religion in The New Criterion , Rob G mentioned another TNC piece, this one by William Gairdner, called "Getting Used to the F-Word," saying it was "even better" than Hart's. I had read it when it came out, and…
-
Weekend Music This old hymn has been playing in my head off and on for several days. There are a number of versions on YouTube but most of them are big elaborate idiosyncrathc rock arrangements, and I just want a straightforward rendition. This was the best I could find.
-
Once again I've had a very busy and stressful week, followed by a not-stressful but nevertheless busy weekend, with little time for anything apart from work and family-related doings. I brought this on myself to some extent by having signed up, back in late November, for a 20-hour course in the Java programming language, which…
-
You may have noticed the Google Doodle today, a rocky-looking thing which turns out to be a reference to Blessed Nicholas Steno, a Danish priest (actually named Steensen) who did some pioneering work in geology. I was not aware of him before today, so I appreciate Google having brought him to my attention. And I'm…
-
I haven't had time to write anything this week, being very busy with work and other things. So I was looking through my bookmarks for things I'd kept with the idea of maybe posting them here, or maybe not. This is one I came across back in November. You may be familiar with Jennifer Fulwiler's…
-
Sunday Night Journal — January 1, 2012 I've seen a couple of cartoons in the past few days making fun of the arbitrary designation of one day in the year as its beginning, and a moment for new starts and second chances. I normally think such spoilsport demystifying is petty, but I'm a little more…
-
For the past several days I've been seeing a story on Google News, which I look at several times a day, with a headline about "The Nun Who Kissed Elvis." I didn't pay any attention, figuring that it was just some silly episode, probably from the '60s, in which a foolish nun developed a crush…
Light On Dark Water 