Sunday Night Journal
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What Did We Do To Deserve This? I’ve been spending far too much time looking at a computer screen and have developed some fairly severe pain in my neck and shoulders. Since I have to do it all day in my job, I’m going to have to greatly reduce the amount of time I spend…
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The Cardinal Prophet The buzz of the week has been the report that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is the, or at least a, leading candidate for the papacy. I don’t think this is very likely, for reasons including his age and the fact that he was a member of the Hitler Youth and was drafted into…
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Journalists Baffled by Commutative Property For about thirty seconds last week I had the idea of keeping a count of all the news stories about John Paul II which included some variant of the motif that he was “liberal” (a good thing) on many broad political issues but “conservative” (a bad thing) on questions of…
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A Captain for the Storm Although I’m a lot older than the millions of people under thirty or so who remember no other pope than John Paul II, I did not become a Catholic until a couple of years into his papacy. So I’m like these young people in that my entire life as a…
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The Storms Are on the Ocean A fairly violent thunderstorm came through my town during the Easter Vigil last night. There had been rain earlier in the evening, but it had mostly stopped by the time the Vigil Mass began. The Mass begins outside the church. A light rain was still falling when we gathered…
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Culture War, or Holland With Nukes? It’s being said, quite rightly, that the Terri Schiavo case is forcing us to face fundamental questions about the value of human life and the conditions under which positive action may be taken to end it. When I emailed several of my children this excellent piece by Fr. Rob…
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Local Heroes I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard…
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Self-Anointed Solomons Always ready to detect any alarming trend, I must say that one of the more alarming was in evidence this past week, in the form of the Supreme Court’s decision finding it impermissible to impose capital punishment for crimes committed when the perpetrator was under the age of eighteen. I have no quarrel…
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Fear and Loathing in Aspen I was never much attracted to the writing of Hunter S. Thompson, and accordingly never read much of it beyond a few excerpts from the two Fear and Loathing books that appeared in Rolling Stone many long years ago. I had at the time enough difficulty maintaining my own equilibrium…
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Inhumanism and the End of Ethics I once said to my boss, by way of making an excuse for a long and rambling email I had just sent her, that sometimes I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down. Sometimes the act of writing takes me a step beyond that, to…
Light On Dark Water 