Yesterday the Eastern Orthodox celebrated the saints, and today many Americans celebrate fallen soldiers, and in the midst of remembrances of saints and soldiers I find myself thinking on a little girl who fought a great battle, and endured worse than a bullet, and who now watches from the blessed cloud of witnesses. It’s a …
“For they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘Whatever could this mean?’ . . . Then Peter said to them, ‘Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the …
“Disentangling beauty from sentimentality is unlikely to be accomplished until it is recognized that evil (as with God’s saving grace) cannot be accommodated within systems that seek to ‘make sense’ of all things within closed cosmological and metaphysical systems… In a nutshell, Christian sentimentalism arises from a premature grasp for Easter morning, a refusal to …
U.S. children are posting sharp increases in drug use for chronic illnesses — one-quarter of all insured children and 30 percent of adolescents, according to a health company study. A large portion of these are antipsychotic and diabetes drugs. What are we to make of this? The doctor who led the study is fairly blunt: “All …
“Looking at children was the real shocker for us” Read More »
I remember, the day they told us our three year-old daughter would die, sitting on her hospital bed, Celeste and I together, holding her and weeping. We never really knew despair, I don’t think, until that day. We held Caroline and we cried, and the doctors stood there, because this is all they were good …
I counted, and I’ve been in my office a total of fifteen minutes since sometime in April. I’ve been home maybe five days. DC, New Orleans, Atlanta, Detroit, DC, DC, DC. I suppose they’d all be nice to visit, if I didn’t have a family in the middle of Kansas. Their voices, when I hear …
Inevitably, in secularized society, after some particularly heinous butchery there is the news article that might be titled: “Searching for Answers.” In this article the reporter speculates on what might have gone wrong in those two-thirds of the murderer — body and mind — that he must pretend are all that constitutes a man. Inevitably …
Reading Bruce Falconer’s article in last month’s Atlantic, about Swiss suicide facilitator Ludwig Manelli, I was struck by a husband’s repeated employment of animal metaphors to justify his wife’s poisoning. “You wouldn’t leave your dog on the kitchen floor when it can’t walk, can’t eat, can’t go outside to the toilet. Transform one life form to another, …
