No Other Bulwark
I’m reminded of a bold assertion, made by my Tablet colleague Liel Liebovitz, on America magazine’s Jesuitical podcast: “The [Catholic] Church is the only — the last — remaining bulwark for human dignity and freedom…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#181)
We too are captive: prisoners of barred rooms and closed roads, unable to see our way out of failure, our betrayals and egoisms, our fears that paralyze, our attachments that hold us frozen. –John Kavanaugh,…
Present Moment, Only Moment
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past…
Today’s One-Liner (#180)
If you withdraw yourself from unnecessary talking and idle running about, from listening to gossip and rumors, you will find enough time that is suitable for holy meditation. –Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated…
Endurable
“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…
Today’s One-Liner (#179)
Anxiety about what I could believe as certain gnawed at my heart all the more sharply as I grew more and more ashamed that I had been misled and deluded by promises of certainty for…
A Yiddish Counterculture
If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…
Today’s One-Liner (#178)
In our house learning was looked upon as the greatest wealth. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court
Find Your Book: A Summer Class in Recognizing and Embracing
Something that you feel will find its own form. Jack Kerouac I’ve shared Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones with a lot of readers, who went on to do writing practice or freewriting. But what does…
Two Types
We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were…