Playing the Lottery Winter 1969, Boston. I was driving a cab at night, while attending Harvard Divinity School. I had run through some scholarship and loan money, and needed cash; Christmas and all that. But I also thought it would be a “good experience” for a wannabe writer. When I turned my cab onto St. … Continue reading Another Quaker Holiday Story: Playing the Lottery
[NOTE: This review does not mention that amid the spreading devastation of the English Civil War, which in 1649 led to the execution of the defeated Charles I, a new radical religious group, derisively called Quakers, was coming into being. The earliest Friends were at least in sympathy with Cromwell’s anti-monarchical “Commonwealth,” and not a … Continue reading Quakerism was born in a terrible civil war. Could it survive another one?
[Note: It’s rare that blog material turns up in the real estate section, especially the mainly rather upscale version in the Washington Post, and particularly in the rather very upscale horsey parts of Loudoun County, Virginia, out near where the Shenandoah Valley begins. But for many decades once upon a time, much of Loudoun was … Continue reading Here’s a Great Look at the Quaker “Good Old Days.” Beautiful — But a Lot of Work
I don’t believe in reincarnation. But if I did, I’d be pretty sure that in a previous life, I shambled through the American 1850s. That might help explain why lately I’ve been having vivid dreamlike flashbacks about them. A few acquaintances would nod knowingly at this admission, and murmur something about “past lives.” What I … Continue reading Seeing Our Future in the Past? Flashbacks from the 1850s
Reported Covid Deaths by U. S. Region: Northeast – 211,923 deaths Midwest – 211,648 deaths West – 189,805 deaths South – 378,472 deaths RANDOLPH SEALS, 39, WAS elected the coroner for Bolivar County, in rural western Mississippi, in 2015. But the relentlessness of the deaths linked to Covid, and his personal ties to so … Continue reading Covid at 1 Million U.S. Deaths: A Special Scourge in the South