Widely reported today, Good Friday among Christians, is the sermon delivered before Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger) by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household. Friar Cantalamessa likened recent criticism of the Pope’s inaction in a priest-pedophile abuse case (when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich, Germany) [...]
In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:
Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with [...]
I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder [...]
Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.
(To be prayed [...]
The Times recently reminded us of one of the timeless films from the 1070s, Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of 10, a representation of the macrocosm and microcosm. The film begins with a camera hovering over a couple’s picnic on the Chicago lakeside, a frame 1 meter wide (10 to the power of 0 meters), [...]
Thank God the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are on watch looking out for your physical and spiritual health. Its Committee on Doctrine, chaired by William Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, has published “Guidelines for Evaluating for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.”
Reiki (an alternative touch therapy used in many hospitals as a complement to [...]
In the late 1970s, Sheldon Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! influenced my own work of cultivation. Kopp, a psychotherapist who died in 1999, ended that book with an “Eschatological Laundry List”:
1. This is it!
2. There are no hidden meanings.
3. You can’t get there from here, and besides there’s no [...]
According to a report in today’s Hartford (Connecticut) Courant (where the Connecticut Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of same-sex marriages so the General Assembly is putting together the legal framework):
Church: Florists Should Be Allowed To Say No To Gay Weddings
By DANIELA ALTIMARI | The Hartford Courant
March 7, 2009
Concerned that the state’s new same-sex [...]
With the arrival of the solstice, winter is here.
Some pics I took at my home this weekend, reminded my friend and fellow vocalist Bill Hunter (of Schola Cantorum) of Christina Rossetti’s poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which begins:
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow [...]
I’m thinking about sex.
(I know; you’re shocked.)
But it’s not what you think.
I’m often amused (and often more than a little bemused) about sex. About how sex is usually not about sex. And about how sex is often configured in some communities in seemingly contradictory (or to be more polite, “paradoxical”) ways.
Margaret Talbot’s article “Red Sex, [...]
One of the handful of points of pride that Thomas Jefferson specified as his epitaph was that he was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Famously in Query 17 of the only book he published in his lifetime, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote:
The legitimate powers of government extend to [...]
Is “neuro” the new “nano”?
Until recently “nano-” whatever (and before that, “geno-” whatever) was all the rage. In a nation as scientifically illiterate as it is historically illiterate and culturally illiterate as ours, perhaps at first blush it might seem contradictory that we would entertain one mania after another, like Toad of Toad Hall, with [...]
I have long been a student of the art of sham fui, the ancient art of conning gullible Westerners who have more money than sense. Recently, I conversed with a woman who told me that she had been an adjunct instructor in the School of Education at a local university; when I asked her what [...]
Americans as diverse as Jonathan Edwards (famous to lit students for his 18th-century sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) and Benjamin Franklin (famous for just about everything except sermons) wrote and kept track of resolutions, seeking to conform their deeds to their ideals, so why should I be different?
Less email, more F2F [...]
