Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Then Things Changed

“I was prepared actually never to be translated, never to be known, to remain a Yiddish writer.” –Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 88

Triumph

If you completely conquer yourself, you will more easily subdue all other things. The perfect victory is to triumph over self. For he who holds himself in such subjection that sensuality obeys reason and reason…

Today’s One-Liner (#185)

We had many mutual friends while he was studying at Harvard and I was working in Boston, but I think our first face-to-face meeting was in jail in Brookline, Massachusetts, after we had both been…

Self-un-awareness

[I]f you believe the scapegoat is guilty, you are not going to name it as being “my scapegoat.” If France scapegoats Dreyfus, no one will recognize that Dreyfus is a scapegoat.  –René Girard, in Cynthia…

Today’s One-Liner (#184)

Among traditional religion’s strongest resources are  precisely its ability to create and validate occasions for silence, contemplation, emptiness in the sense of cessation from activity and worldly meaning. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of…

This, But Not That

We’ve all seen self-deception of this kind on display in the reaction of Catholic educators to last Friday’s address by Pope Benedict. Having effectively divorced themselves from the Church with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes…

Today’s One-Liner (#183)

In retrospect it is easy to see what was not perceived at the time — that no conservative body with an ancient and sacred system of symbols can alter these significantly without a severe spiritual…

Today’s One-Liner (#182)

Those who keep thinking about their needs, their wants, their plans, their ideas, cannot help becoming lonely and insecure.  –Eknath Easwaran, Seeing with the Eyes of Love: Reflections on a Classic of Christian Mysticism, 11

Read “The Demons”!

What would Dostoevsky say about our “multicultural” universities, our dismal sexual “liberations,” our radical feminists forcing their “all-inclusive” versions of the Bible down the throat of meekly submissive Christian churches? We do not have to…