I would be hard at work on some important email or working on the media system (so fearfully complex that the children called it The System) and one of them would come and interrupt. Oh, blessed days! I knew just enough then to know that the day would come when I would miss those interruptions. Now, decades later, I would wish that this piece or anything else I am doing would be interrupted by, “Dad . . . ” Work... Read more
Opposing the murderous Soviet Union was not what the cool kids did back when I was the right age to be a kid. (I have always been temperamentally unable to be cool, even as a kid.) This continued right through graduate school until the Soviet Union fell, the truth could be found in archives, and even Gorbachev turned out to be monstrous so anti-communists waited for a (moment of) vindication. This never took place, because as one academic told me: “We... Read more
If you take enough pictures, sometimes one will turn out well. When you had to “get the camera” and use costly film to take a picture, bad picture takers (such as I am!) rarely got good pictures. We posed, we tried, we even read articles (in magazines printed on paper) about how to take better pictures. Sadly for our my now adult children, none of this information helped me so they are in scads of bad pictures where the couch... Read more
Walter Duranty used his Pulitzer and his education to lie for Stalin. If you disliked Uncle Joe Stalin, you were a yahoo, part of the unwashed, and ignored. That was a lie, built on lies, supported by lies. Credentialed experts lied for tyrants. If you found this out, you had a right to be enraged. Liars, secure in elite positions, told your neighbors lies about genocidal maniacs so that they could indulge their own passions. If you opposed the Soviet... Read more
If you were told that smart Americans got their news in the New York Times about Communism in the Soviet Union from a man who was spent his youth worshiping with Aleister Crowley wouldn’t that seem unbelievable? Who was Crowley? In the early teens of the twentieth century, at the age of thirty-eight, Beast 666, the Great Magister, “the Wickedest Man in the World,” as Crowley alternately called himself. . .* Drug user, misogynist, Crowley would spend a lifetime promoting... Read more
Luxury is fun on a holiday, but can be deadly in a lifetime, keeping us from knowing true love. Fasting sharpens our awareness of ideas and spiritual things. Successful people I have known often live relatively simple personal lives. They know that eating holiday food every day leaves nothing for a feast. This creates boredom, leaving aside any moral issues about waste or self-indulgence. What is love? How can we find true love?* The dilettante toys with wisdom, but wisdom... Read more
When we listen to our times, our church, whose poetry are we hearing and whose hymns are we missing? I own a battered green book retrieved from a Galveston library discarded book bin. The 1896 second edition contains the story of a very interesting man who did some good in his time, was loved by many, but who got the one big event of his lifetime more than wrong: Father Ryan, Confederate chaplain, priest, and poet. He was evidently a... Read more
We saw Tropical Storm Harvey coming in Houston, knew that something bad was coming, but could do little. The tempest was coming, mostly too late to change the path we had trod when sitting in the path of the wrath of gods. Houston had to accept what could not be denied. We also had the choice to act with courage and be strong in the storm. We (mostly) did and were. Just now we face a metaphorical storm as a... Read more
Before he became a Christian, a relative was a shill for a patent-medicine man. As a good looking, bright young man his job was to hear the pitch and then say from the back of the audience: “I will take one.” That got the buying going. When he became a Christian, that, like a lot of other things, had to go. Persuasion should come from clear thinking and a clean heart! Beware rhetoric without a love of wisdom. The sage... Read more
There are people, topics, and positions that if you even mention them became the topic or keep an audience from focussing on the deeper issues. I once gave a lecture on beauty to a group of parents in the early twenty-first century. During the extensive questions at the end, one parent asked my view of the Harry Potter series. “I will not comment,” I commented, “because it is such a hot topic that no matter what I say the important topic of beauty in... Read more
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