“Those poor brutish Epicureans that have nothing but the meer husks of fleshly pleasure to feed themselves with.” ~John Smith, 1660
How did we get Epicurus so wrong? Foodie websites, luxury magazines, gourmet shops…he would be aghast. His goal was to remove pain and fear, not pile up…
“Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks, and everyone has a different answer. King, prophet, peasant, rebel, son, shepherd, rabbi, redeemer—to this day, Jesus is what each of us needs him to be.
A solid old brick house on Clayton Road with a sign outside: Living Insights Center. A meeting place, maybe, some kind of recovery program? I step inside. In the first room to the right, a lifesize statue of St. Therese of Lisieux gazes at an illuminated Qur’an, a silver…
I am not losing my faith. I am wondering where that religion truly is. Is this really the place where God Himself enters into physical form in our midst?
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
People worried sick about bigotry used to murmur, “Our hope is the young people.” Now the opposite is true.
Why would I not desire a good Camembert, or a sweater soft as a lamb?
Having lived in the United States for a few years, I have either struggled to understand democracy in practice or struggled to keep up with it.
My friend is a little witchy, a little woowoo. She gets “feelings” before something happens.... Does precognition exist?
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.