Eight of the first 19 picks in yesterday's NBA draft were high school players. All of them went before St. Joe's guard — and St. Joe's graduate — Jameer Nelson, the college player of the year who led the Hawks to an undefeated season last year. The NBA, in other words, has just invested millions of dollars and the hopes and futures of many of its franchises, in a bunch of teenagers. Much talk today in the sports world of... Read more
Every Sunday, our paper publishes a summary of recent votes in Congress, reporting how members from our region voted. These reports, provided by the Roll Call Report Syndicate, are as matter of fact as possible — they're like the box scores in sports or the stock listings in business. Roll Call's job is just to summarize, as accurately and succinctly as possible, what was voted on and how members voted. Yet despite this dry approach, the VIC isn't always dry... Read more
Thom Hartmann's essay, "Scrooge & Marley, Inc. — The True Conservative Agenda," includes some wonderful comments on democracy and wealth from the third president, Thomas Jefferson. Such as: "Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found which did not... Read more
His senior year at Indian River High School in Frankford, Del., Russell White was the starting nose guard for the Indians' football team, despite weighing only 165 pounds. "That's pretty light for a nose guard, but he was just so quick," [former football coach Jimmy] Bunting said. "He was an athlete that gave everything he could." That same year, 2001, Russell White decided what he would do after graduation. He would join the Marines: "He wanted to get bin Laden,"... Read more
Sometimes photographers capture the whole story and reporters just fill out the rest of the page. News Journal (Del.) photographer Scott Nathan did that Sunday in this story about two dozen members of the Delaware Air National Guard who shipped out on Father's Day. The expressions on the faces of Maj. Joe Berti and his son tell everything their is to say about fathers, families, duty and war. But there is more to the story. Maj. Berti and his fellow... Read more
Something petty this way comes Ray Bradbury apparently wants Michael Moore to apologize for alluding to a work of literature. … Bradbury is demanding an apology from filmmaker Michael Moore for lifting the title from his classic science-fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451" without permission and wants the new documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" to be renamed. "He didn't ask my permission," Bradbury, 83, told the Associated Press on Friday. "That's not his novel. That's not his title, so he shouldn't have done it."... Read more
Sojourners' Rose Marie Berger interviews the great mad farmer, poet and prophet of Kentucky, Wendell Berry. The complete interview is online at Sojonet (along with a fine picture of Berry from photographer Ryan Beiler — who was always grossly underpaid when I published his work in PRISM). Berry is a national treasure and an all-too-well-kept secret. His poetry is not as widely read or anthologized as it should be, but then no poets these days are as widely read as... Read more
So you run into this guy who, ten years ago back in college, dated this girl Susan from your dorm. He strikes you as much more interesting now than he was back then, so you ask him, "What's up with you and Susan?" He says, "My relationship goes back a decade." This is not what you wanted to hear. It means he and Susan are clearly still involved. Probably deeply involved. In normal American English, that's what the phrase "going... Read more
Amy Sullivan's basic thesis, in "Jesus Christ, Superstar," is that wretched books like the Left Behind series are popular in the evangelical subculture because of a lack of alternative "Christian-themed entertainment": … sometime in the 1960s, religiously-themed entertainment simply disappeared. … This is a problem because when the only Christian-themed entertainment in the marketplace is laced with conservatism, Christianity itself will increasingly take on a conservative cast. The faith of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr... Read more
Oh, and as a kind of preface to my response to the idea that there's a lack of "competition" for the shallow, right-wing "Christian-themed entertainment" of the Left Behind books, here's an excerpt from a long essay on one of the best-selling books of all time — Charles Sheldon's In His Steps. This is from the Jan./Feb. 1999 issue of PRISM magazine. The occasion for the article was the release of the paperback version of a revisiting of Sheldon's story... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In