Today’s One-Liner (#28)
Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight. ––René Girard, Maxim #30, in All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, edited by Cynthia L. Haven.
Category: Reflections
Say Yes!
Wednesday 22 September 2021 Dear J, It was energizing and inspiring to spend two-and-a-half hours with you yesterday at Hartford Coffee! I want to share a bit more with you about one of the books…
“I Remember” by Loran Aladdin
Loran wrote the following for my Humanities 101 class at Maryville University this past spring semester. _______________________ I remember a lifetime of feeling as though I should refrain from being proud of my identity. I…
That Glow, That Yes!
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
God Is Hidden. Poetry Is Obvious.
On Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty We find comfort only in Another beauty, in others’ Music, in the poetry of others. Salvation lies with others, Though solitude may taste like Opium. Other people aren’t hell If…
“Why Must the Poet’s Mouth Be Bloodied, His Teeth Caved in?”
More than a decade ago, octogenarian Jesuit felon Daniel Berrigan spoke at the local Jesuit university (in the auditorium of the business school, no less). During the Q & A, a friend of mine asked…
Short, Savory, and Sound: Aitken’s Miniatures
In fall 2000 I first encountered Robert Aitken Roshi with his book, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps, a collection of scores of four-line poems, or gathas. Nine years later, I read his Miniatures of a…
After Reading a 2002 Book by Arundhati Roy
What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing. To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try…
The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017
Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American. It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri…
The Good News, 3.8.2017
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …