Mark
January 23, 2021
Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
November 23, 2020
“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
October 31, 2020
Dwight Moody, the great revivalist, appreciated fire and brimstone. He knew nothing better, he said, than the notion “that Our Lord is coming again” to “take the men of this world out of their stocks and bonds.” As a preacher, he knew it worked, that it moved souls.
May 14, 2020
Making readers like me of George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin highly uncomfortable, a San Diego company has developed a technology to monitor social distance. Already in use in some places, it’s called Active Distance Alert and Monitoring, or ADAM, eerily, for short. The technology maps signals emitted by phones, so that crowded areas like grocery stores […]
September 24, 2021
There’s a story by the great Lebanese writer, Kahlil Gibran, called “John the Madman.”
October 2, 2021
It’s unlikely you’ve heard of John Beukels, the charismatic Anabaptist leader of the German city of Münster in the 1530s, from the early years of the Reformation.
October 10, 2021
A century ago, the big issue, for Catholics and Protestants alike, was the automobile. The Spanish Flu, of course, was a problem too, killing millions as it did. Yet it was the automobile that was a more enduring threat some thought, more of a game changer.
October 17, 2021
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the “drum major instinct.”
January 28, 2024
Lacking much rhetorical invention this week, I thought I’d pull back the curtain in his homily and make it more of a “how-to,” or a homily about a homily or something like that. That is, I thought it interesting (at least for me) to share with you how I go about thinking up and writing a […]