Opposite Day

On Tuesday, voters here in Ohio will decide several ballot initiatives, including Issue 2, which will, by  constitutional amendment, establish a state board to oversee livestock production. At first, what I heard sounded good, a lot of talk about family farms, local food, and humane husbandry. One group promoting the initiative calls itself “Ohioans for [...]

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The Hitchhiker’s Lament

A friend at work recently returned from a trip to California. He had spent an afternoon in the redwoods and had been most impressed by the magical beauty of the place, surely one of the spots the Celts called “thin places”, where the veil between the worlds is translucent. That got me thinking of the [...]

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Winds of Fear, Works of Mercy

I have not written anything here for two months. Without going into detail, it is enough to say that my melancholy self has been afflicted on nearly every side by travail: my mother’s cancer, added stresses at work, financial strain, growing alienation. The bright spots in all this have been the Divine Liturgy, my bride [...]

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Losing My Favorite Beer

My family that I grew up in was not Christian in its beliefs.  My father, who definitely set the religious tone for the family, called himself a Unitarian, so although we almost always went to church, I was not expected to conform to any creed, quite the opposite really.  But culturally our home was decidedly [...]

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April 4, 2009 Debate on Catholics and Economics

Some of you may remember that last April 4 at Nassau Community College on Long Island I participated in a debate on economics, representing distributism against Charles Clark (socialism) and Michael Novak (capitalism). Recently the video of the debate has been posted on the web. This link contains each speaker’s presentation, but does [...]

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Surprise, the Pope is Catholic

I had been planning on writing at length on Benedict XVI’s new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, but Stuart Reid has written so well on it in The American Conservative that I will just link to his succinct and eloquent essay here .
I will only add that I am much gratified and not a little bewildered by [...]

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New Contact Page

I realized a while back that there was no contact info here and have finally gotten around to adding a page for that—you should be seeing a “Contact” tab above the main graphic now.
As we noted a while back, we are actively soliciting posts from other people. Please contact Daniel if you would like to [...]

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In His Vision

One of the many delightful things about small children is when they reach for a word, get it wrong, but come up with one that is even more evocative than the one they missed.
My niece, Wendy, when she was small wonderfully called serpents “sneaks” and I still find myself thinking of the phrase “like a [...]

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Death

I assume that anyone who visits this site is familiar with Maclin Horton’s blog, Light on Dark Water, which is linked here. It is consistently good; Maclin in recent years has moved out into the depths, and between his meditative posts and the ensuing conversations- among the most erudite and witty I have encountered on [...]

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Mistaken Identity

The telephone rang the other evening. Joey, who is nine, answered it. He listened in silence for a moment, then handed the phone to me: “It’s for you. It’s political.”
“Hello?”, I said.
A woman’s voice said “Good evening, sir. Could I ask you a few questions on the abortion issue?”
“Sure.”
“Do you consider yourself prolife, prochoice, or [...]

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