Our dog got a treat, not just a treat, but a treat from Rochester.* Hope, gone to the home of our alma mater, where we met in high school, and met again after college, knew who needed a reward. Nessie, the Wonder Dog, missed Hope. Zweigles, maker of these treats, also makes delicious “hots.” When I first came to Rochester from civilization (West Virginia), I was unsure what a “hot” was, red or white. Zweigles taught me the difference: hotdogs... Read more
I thought the concert would be glorious, but the music was hard work. Let me tell about an experience in learning mostly failed by me, but where a few gleams of joy over time made all worthwhile. This might encourage someone else to try the same: hard music, new to you, played live, and learned through meditation. All this began on never ending daytime in Russia. We walked to the Opera House together, hand in hand, in Saint Petersburg, a... Read more
Two principles regarding treats: A man can live without cake and cannot live on cake alone. We cannot eat the cake and still have cake. This is fortunate for us, since treats are rare for most people in the world just now. In Paradise, where there is a party without end, if cake is your jam, you get cake. Here and now, nobody can be sure that cake is coming. For daily bread, we pray, the necessities of life. Why?... Read more
Music matters. Music matters too much to leave to the professionals. This thought, more Plato than mine, inspired a key leader at our School and College to write. Here is Lauren Turner, director of Fine Arts! Since moving to the Houston area almost five years ago, I have learned that Houston has what is referred to as a “rainy season”. This rainy season takes place somewhere between January and December of any given calendar year and its trademark is... Read more
Do we live in the end of an age? Yesterday, Mom, wise woman, said: “There are many signs of the end the age, not perhaps the End, but an end. And, of course, one end will be the End. Maybe this one will be the End.” If you are not given to Christianity, then eschatology, a discussion of the End of things may make little sense. If like two and one half billions of people, you are a Christian, then... Read more
Sixty years ago when time to go home from the chemical factory, you needed a shower. Dupont and Carbide* did not want the troubles going home, though if you left your car outside regularly, the paint could get harmed from the air. That was a downside of the Kanawha River Valley. The upside were the people. Evidently, back in the day of my grands, as the men would head to the shower someone would get smacked with a rolled up... Read more
The cosmos is built on Divine Love. The difficulty, of course, is that once one rejects some element of divine Love the entire order begins to unravel. We can choose badly, but bad results happen when we do. In this life, God causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust providing a stable social order where people who reject Him can find happiness. God’s constant hope is to woo us, giving all of us, better than our choices... Read more
Beauty creates love, and love desires consent. Beauty is the mother of the dialectic: the discussion between students that is the heart of classical education. When we look Godward, we see beauty. This recognition of beauty can occur in a great book that some soul made in God’s image wrote. The beauty found in a poem by Langston Hughes stirs love and love begins a dialog with the poem. Beauty may appear in a film such as the Passion of... Read more
An old classic rhetorical juke of the heretic, Arius was first master, is to claim controversy having created the controversy. Take any ethical issue. If the powerful decide that what has been good is now bad, some Christian religious leader or college professor will be found to dialog with the old evil as if it were a new good. “Let us ask, if indeed, every infant should be born, if abortion is such an important issue, maybe we were worried about... Read more
There are, as we already knew, unidentified flying objects. These objects are unidentified and fly. That is all we know and we already knew that there were such things. Probably these objects will soon be identified and the explanations will be disappointing. One thought: the more complex our machinery, the greater the chance that we begin to see inexplicable artifacts through our technology, a more complex form of the light leaks in early cameras that gave us ghostly images when... Read more
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