Sunday Night Journal
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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
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On Not Reading Books Don't worry, I'm not about to argue against reading books–just asking myself why I've hardly opened one since sometime around Thanksgiving. It began with the fact that I had a project at work that had to be finished by the end of the year, and that was going to require working
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There But For Fortune I watched, in snippets over a week or so, the above-named documentary about Phil Ochs. Once considered along with Dylan a major "protest singer," Ochs had a considerably lesser artistic gift, and stuck with left-wing activism long after Dylan had withdrawn from it. I never listened to him very much, because
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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
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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
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Upstairs Downstairs 2 and Downton Abbey This is sort of a follow-up to that post a few weeks about Upstairs Downstairs. I don't think I mentioned in that one that the reason we were watching the original series was that we had seen the new one which first aired last year. I'd noticed the ads for it
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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
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July 18, 2004: a review of The Innocence Mission’s Befriended. I removed some obsolete links and information about eMusic.com, which is still around and to which I still subscribe, though it’s changed a lot since 2004.
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This will be brief, because I spent most of this afternoon and evening at the hospital where my daughter Ellen had just given birth to my newest grandchild, James Lucas Tynes. Mother and son are doing fine. Second Thoughts About Christopher Hitchens A few weeks ago I wrote a sort of obituary for Hitchens in which,
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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
Light On Dark Water 