Last night I attended a concert at the United Center. The Pretenders with Chrissie Hynde opened for Stevie Nicks. Nicks has been writing lyrics and performing her songs, album after album, since the early 1970s. Nicks is on tour with her band to reprise her songs written over a forty year career as a…
The first sip of coffee, like a knife-cut of astringence, faintly sweet and bitter to the tongue: a metaphor for life. With practice some develop a taste for it,…. for life that is. I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every…
We are embedded in the day to day. We tend not to notice the exquisite design all around us, the product of our progenitors sweat, intelligence and passion. Reflecting upon this past Thanksgiving holiday, feeling some awe at the memory of a well appointed dining table. In the pleasant company of family, children and…
And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun. There was a sense of the imminent, the…
How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” “Perhaps,” said Thon Taddeo, “but I doubt it.” “You reject all history, then, as a myth?” “Not ‘reject.’ But it must be questioned. Who wrote your histories?” “….a doubt…
A radical skepticism reduces reason to its own caricature: to a mere rationalization of positions that were actually predetermined by desire and were held– or secured– by force alone. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch Meaning, Published 1975 Who was Michael Polanyi? Michael Polanyi, (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath,…
It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive. The point is precisely that every age is different: each time has been unique, both in what it promised and what it threatened; sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. Irrational Man…
Ah, Jake and Elwood, so nice to see you again! I happened upon The Blues Brothers Movie last night. A few years have passed since my last viewing of the iconic film. Jake and Elwood are ex-cons. Jake is picked up by his brother Elwood outside of Joliete prison. They visit the Catholic orphanage…
Retrieved my copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony. I periodically review it with fresh interest, as the years pass. Accrued life experience allows a richer and deeper interpretation of Bradford’s words. Yes, these were Englishmen, my ancestors by blood and by religious heritage. Their tale is similar to immigrant tales of our…
Canary no. 1 Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized —…
