Rodrigo’s son is Adrian. Adrian is disabled. Rodrigo works three jobs to pay for his care. Rodrigo brought Adrian from Peru to the United States 15 years ago, so he’d receive the best care possible, so he could live. Because Rodrigo loves Adrian, a father and a son.
It should be required reading, I think, for members of the clergy: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, that masterpiece of American literature and of the American psyche.
He likely knew it was a dumb idea from the beginning. At the end of his life, it looks like he changed his mind, became more practical. Or maybe it was Socrates who was the foolish idealist; maybe it’s the mature Plato we discover in his later writings, certainly a more sensible Plato.
A rhetorical question, it was very much meant to sting. Paul to the Corinthians: he asked them, “Is Christ divided?”[1] It was a question which called into question everything; it was existential.
In the novel An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch there’s a scene at the beginning of the death of the matriarch of a well-to-do middle-class family in London. The nearly-deceased was not really loved, or at least there was little positive affection in a family comprised of members so benignly self-centered. They were awkwardly present at […]