The first time I heard the Jeff Bezos Apology story, it was from my big brother just the other day, and I immediately thought: No way. There is just no way Jeff Bezos publicly apologized. And he simply could not possibly be dumb enough to do what he had allegedly apologized for. Not that he’s … Continue reading When Jeff Bezos Personally Apologized. No, Really.
Tom Friedman, longtime NYTimes columnist, treats us to some snippets of diary entries from his first trip to Afghanistan, in early 2002, with then Senator Joe Biden. Friedman opens the piece in the posture of sadder-but-wiser sage: “I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in … Continue reading “Nation Building” on the Moon? Smarter than the U.S. in Afghanistan?
My friend Patrick O’Neill is serving a year in a federal prison, for attacking a replica of a nuclear missile at a south Georgia navy base in April of 2018. (A post with more about that protest is here.) It’s part of his peace witness as a member of the Catholic Worker movement. Most of … Continue reading Patrick O’Neill – A Letter from the Hole
“History doesn’t repeat,” Mark Twain supposedly said, “but sometimes it rhymes.” Are the conflicts within so many American churches over LGBTQ and associated issues part of some cruel karmic sonnet? The Separation Generation’s three volumes approach this question in prose, by chronicling disruptions among five American Yearly Meetings extending roughly from 2011 to 2018 (along … Continue reading Broken Churches, Broken Nation (Again?)
Several years ago, while visiting France, I was taken to Rouen and shown the cathedral in their old city square. I was told how the Impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted a famous series of canvases there, capturing the cathedral’s changing look as the daylight shifted and waned. The idea of pursuing the ever-changing … Continue reading My Own Homely Cathedral: An Hommage to Claude Monet