Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Dylan’s Tweets
Yesterday I had lunch and spent some time with Andrew Ivers, a gentleman and a scholar, at Courtesy Diner on Hampton. Of course, we eventually came around to Bob Dylan, after Andrew gave me a…
The One Thing That Is Important
Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980. I’ve been imagining coming up with a class in which we’d explore Chris Isherwood, Ram Dass, and especially The Gospel of Sri…
When Life Starts to Improve
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…
A Year of Reading Marcel Proust (& Sri Ramakrishna)
Cami Kasmerchak just gave me the idea of a reading group (like the one we did in 2021 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Who’s been wanting to…
Glenn Greenwald and the Gospels
Today I received by email a Substack article by Glenn Greenwald, which is worth reading: Values and Character v. Political Identity: Some Personal Reflections–“The Brazilian firefighter, union leader, evangelical and ex-Congressman Cabo Daciolo was once…
Which Would You Choose?!
I receive frequent emails from Tablet, including the late afternoon What Happened Today: Scroll. Here is today’s Idea of the Day—
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…
Ed Snowden, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald
Check out Matt Taibbi’s article today, The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell: In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written. Here’s the penultimate paragraph: “That…
Share the Wealth
I started a project in September 2012 when I gave a name to what I’d been doing for a couple of years, namely, asking my friends and students if they’d be willing to share with…