My brother’s cat Lucy is elegance questing for loveliness. She has an unerring instinct for beauty. Lucy will find the right place, with the proper light, and pose. The pictures are delightful. She is particularly good at making beauty, yet from Solomon to our own Athena, our cats always found beauty and added their own cattishness. Purple flowers are lovely, posies with posed black cat are spectacular. Like Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, one can look for beauty only to discover wonder... Read more
Beauty is all around us. Having said that truth, what next? The cosmos is beautiful, and this beauty is for the cosmos and God. We are allowed to marvel at the glory, but the beauty does not belong to us. JRR Tolkien understood that the trees belonged to the trees, the beauty of the trees was their own beauty, and we could not cavalierly destroy such wonder for our own purposes. As intelligent beings, created in the image of God, we... Read more
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
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