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  • Can a Catholic be a Progressive? (Part 2)

    Everybody, except maybe David Brooks and his gang, knows it’s not working. By 'it' I mean the cultural/political/economic system we call 'society'. On one level you can say, "Well, has it ever worked?" And the answer is sometimes better, sometimes worse. But because the stakes are higher now it's more important than ever that it

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  • Reflection during the Easter Triduum

    I was asked at my parish to be one of those who offer a reflection on the "Last Words" during today's Tre Ore service. I reflected on“My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?” Following is the text: God’s ways are not our ways, and it’s a good thing, too. How otherwise could we

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  • Not Sure

    My wife died a week ago Friday.  We were married in 1978. She had been dealing with health issues all her life, and had been weakened by challenges she had to deal with this past summer, but this was unexpected. I'm in shock, and my head is spinning. So I'm not sure how much posting

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  • Eulogy for Ethel Whelan, 1/13/15

    We are here to celebrate Ethel’s life and to honor her memory, but also to grieve her passing. The grief cannot be ignored. It’s real, and it comes in waves, and I am hoping that I am in a trough now long enough to get through this. Ethel was a mensch. She was the humanest

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  • Believing 1

    [Ed: I'm preparing a post on C.S. Peirce's ideas about 'The Fixation of Belief' ' elaborated on in his 1877 essay of the same name, which is something I'm just becoming familiar with. So I thought that I'd repost today Believing 1, which I originally published here in January 2006, and tomorrow I'll post "Believing

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  • Toolan, At Home in the Cosmos

    Download Toolan, At Home in Cosmos  

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  • Quote of the Day: Andrew Revkin

    For two generations, the nascent environmental movement railed against this process. Like many, I was weaned on that scary sensibility. Population was a ticking bomb. Spring threatened to be silent. I still admire those who led the call for cleaning up the mess people had created in the rise and spread of industrialized, consumptive living.

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  • Arvo Part: I am the True Vine

    Typepad, which provides the platform of this blog, has been under a Denial of Services Attack for the last 18 hours or so. It's on again off again.  In the meanwhile, one of Jonathan's comments made me think it might be appropriate for today to have a musical interlude. Here is Arvo Part's I Am The

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  • Repost–Word of the Day: Endo-colonialism

    From a post about Paul Virilio interview in January 2011. I thought it was interesting in the light of some of the posts lately about the NSA, etc. Virilio is clearly a dude who fears the control agenda of the technocracy: . . . Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political

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  • The Erosion of the Human

    My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits. –Jonathan Safran Foer The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us

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