St Basil the Great, defender of the Church and martyr, was woke. You should be woke too. Don’t substitute your politics for the commandments of Christ. That is not the Way. From The Divine Liturgy of St Basil: “Free those who are held captive by unclean spirits; sail with those who sail; travel with those who travel; defend the widows; protect the orphans; liberate the captives; heal the sick. “Remember, Lord, those who are in mines, in exile, in harsh... Read more
“Pro Life” zealots who use pregnancy and childbearing to punish and attack women are not pro life. They’re misogynists with an excuse. The moral underpinning of the pro life movement has nothing to do with punishing women. It is an affirmation of the simple and obvious fact that the right of human beings to be alive without fear of being murdered is the basic human right. No one has the right to kill another human being for any reason other... Read more
When you learn to sit at table with your Judas, you’ll understand the love of Christ. From a meme I saw on Facebook. Forgiveness can be the most difficult demand that Jesus makes of us. Sitting at table with your Judas, with someone close and intimate who has betrayed you, is difficult, I’m sure, although I don’t know much about it. I haven’t been through the betrayals that happen during a divorce, haven’t experienced the back-stabbing that some relatives... Read more
Holy Week opened today as it is does each year, with palms. Churches distribute palms, and worshippers process into the church. Mothers everywhere whisper “Stop that!” to the horseplay that results. We were Episcopalians back in the early 1990s, but the mass was the same. My little boys had to be reminded that the palms were not swords. It was always a challenge to keep them walking in line into the church and then to deal with the squirming, poking,... Read more
A normal Lent for American Catholics is drenched in petty personal piety and nonsensical “sacrifice” like giving up chewing gum and going to confession to seek forgiveness for getting wasted at last summer’s Fourth of July party. Lent, American style, has very little to do with the blood-drenched Passion of Our Lord, and even less to do with the reality that the world around us is a butcher shop. We Americans are, on the surface at least, a privileged people.... Read more
Russian bots walk in carrying a bottle of Vodka and waving a swastika. They look like people an American would ordinarily trust. Their propaganda is aimed at the same people they’ve been manipulating for the last six years. You know, the idiots who voted for Trump for supposedly “moral” reasons even though they knew that he had 1. Set up a phony university and defrauded the people who paid tuition out of their money, 2. Managed somehow to go bankrupt... Read more
The leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church denounced the “horrific war crimes” committed by Russian troops in Bucha. Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said that the world saw “such scenes after the liberation from the Nazis” and now is seeing them again in Ukraine. “Literally a few tens of kilometers from the center of Kyiv, in the liberated towns, we see horrific war crimes,” he said. “Mass graves with hundreds of lifeless bodies. Executed people lying in the streets, sometimes... Read more
If you saw the photos of the slaughter of innocent civilians in Bucha by Russian troops, there is no need to explain this photo. There are calls to put Putin on trial for war crimes. The obvious question is how do we actually punish the head of state of a major nuclear power? There are other questions. Who was the Russian commander in Bucha? Who were the Russian officers? What happened in Bucha does not look like the work of... Read more
Children are a gift that keeps on giving. I remember when I was young and the world was green that young women my age talked a lot about how having a baby was a 20-year sentence. This was a response to the way that childbearing had been used as an excuse to discriminate against women in education, career and every other life opportunity. The anger about the discrimination was totally justified. But the conclusion about children themselves was just hyperbole... Read more
What’s all this talk about the “yield curve” and why does it matter to you? The yield curve is a plot line, just like any plot line you would make in a spreadsheet on your computer. It is based on length of time a bond has before it pays out the interest it has promised to pay the person who bought the bond, combined with the price the bond is worth in the open market. “Short-term” bonds pay out sooner... Read more
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