When we are young, we talk with greatest feeling about our dreams for the future. The adventure of old age is staying alive just a little bit longer, and the great battle is with one’s own mind and body. Old people are fighting nonstop, even as they sit in sunrooms or knit with seeming contentment.
Outside Donald Trump’s St. Louis Campaign Headquarters, election night. It has been a week. Anything else anybody wants to announce? We could all use a break. My sons and I were out and about during election week, to bear witness to the historically significant, should it occur. But…
According to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, even six-month-old babies stress out when they see a spider or a snake.
Asked the overarching subject of her work, O’Connor replied, “The action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” If the life and work are inseparable, her faith and her work are even tightly bound. Yet dogma never kept her from seeing things whole.
Sean Connery, in a screenshot from ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.’ I can remember when a critic went coocoo-bananas that Sean Connery had supposedly started playing father/mentor roles. This was after the release of 1986’s Highlander, in which he played a “Spaniard” from ancient Egypt who trains…
I share our dog’s affection for Lakeview Park, its wide, smooth path rising and falling alongside three small lakes edged with reeds, a weeping willow, a dock, a steep hill. One Saturday morning in early October, as soon as the sun slanted through cold mist, we set off happily. By…
When I was a kid, Sinclair Oil Company used to hand out Apatosaurus toys and soap-on-a-rope as incentives, since their logo was “Dino” the dinosaur. Word on the street with the banana-seat bunch was that oil came from dead dinosaurs. Oil began, of course, as algae and plankton mixed…
Both journalism and academe hinge on free and open research, questioning, exploration, yet at the highest levels, it is rare to hear, “Go dig around and see what you come up with” or “If you’re not sure about this, stay with it until you are.” Instead, you have to pretend confidence, because often, those with established power want their own world view reinforced, their plans bolstered, their agendas fulfilled, their budgets closed.
At the risk of sounding like a nun insisting that the children wear clean plaid uniforms because they will study harder, I find myself thinking that we are all somehow a little better when we know there are ways we should behave. Not in robotic conformity, but by acknowledging the needs of those around us and the gravity of our responsibility to them.
Why the grotto will endure as a place to think, pray, worry about a diagnosis, ache for a loved one, savor their recovery, appreciate the healthcare workers’ sacrifices.