Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Today’s One-Liner (#139)

Salvador de Madariaga once said that our culture should give to each man and woman, when each reaches the age of voting, a sturdy, elegant book containing an account of the death of Socrates and…

When Jesus Was Irked

As they were rejoining the crowd a man came up to him and went down on his knees before him. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘take pity on my son: he is demented and in a wretched…

Today’s One-Liner (#138)

 How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different the saints. –C.S. Lewis, by way of Katrina Becker

Today’s One-Liner (#137)

If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell

Getting Free

Olga Katunal [was]  a political activist who eventually left the Communist party and returned to Judaism via German philosophy. …[She] made more radical choices when she abandoned Trotsky for Moses in the interwar years. –Judith…

Today’s One-Liner (#135)

The dire state of the Palestinian movement today suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the use of terror and the achievement of freedom. –Susie Linfield, The Return of the Progressive Atrocity

Freeing up the Imagination

Not too long ago, I heard a tape of the memorial service held at Stanford University Chapel at the death of Eric Voegelin. On the tape, Professor William Havard, I think, remarked that Voegelin read…

Today’s One-Liner (#134)

I was crushed, overwhelmed by having to face what the nation of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant was capable of. –Rachmil Bryks, May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych, trans. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub