Thought of the Day
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. –Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 41
Category: Uncategorized
You, Too?
I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world,…
A Classic Is a Book That Has Never Finished Saying What It Has to Say
The moral compass of Les Misérables thus spreads far beyond the history, geography, politics and economics of the world in which its story is set. The novel achieves the extraordinary feat of being at the…
Commonplace Book: Rokhl, 2019
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, playwright, attorney, and Jewish world gadfly in New York City.
A Poem
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore was a prolific American Muslim poet.
The Patron Saint of All Outsiders
This French version of Kafka, this cross between Pascal and Orwell remains unclassifiable. She is intellectually stateless, prophet without any country in which she can be sure of honor. A Catholic Jewess who criticized impeccably…
Ginsberg’s Gratitude
And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of…
Autumn Merton Hour with Rocco Erker: Love, War, and a Vocation
Join us for our fourth Zoom gathering this year to explore the work of Thomas Merton—Sunday 20 November7 p.m. Central TimeEmail me for URL: markjchmiel@gmail.com Rocco Erker has been a lifelong reader and student of Thomas…
Notice What You Notice
Primo Levi: I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded…
What I Learned from Mev by Cami
My friend Cami Kasmerchak was generous enough to make this video for a talk I was to give at Visitation Academy, Mev’s alma mater, for the first-year students who were on retreat on Friday 16…