Life in the United States of Amnesia
So we plod along, more or less in the dark, more or less humiliated by the dreary quality of our prayer, our worship by turns inane and trivial, our sense of the holy vitiated, distracted,…
Tag: Daniel Berrigan
A Jesuit’s Advice
Part of the trouble is that so few who walked out landed anywhere. Frying pan to fire; they left the church and the culture swallowed them whole. It seems better, as a rule, to hang…
Recent Reading
Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ Wendell Berry, Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness…
Today’s One-Liner (#35)
Our legacy is Jesus and the saints. –Daniel Berrigan, S.J., The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power
Counter-the Culture
The highest way of living for those who take the tonsure is to aim to lack nothing while owning nothing. —Yoshida Kenkô, Essays in Idleness, translated by Meredith McKinney If you wish to possess everythingYou must…
Cheer Up: Reminders
Furnace. The first evening, about 5 o’clock, the pain from the extreme heat, exhaustion, and headaches make me completely lose control of my movements. I can’t lower the furnace damper. A coppersmith jumps up and…
Being Present (Somehow)
1. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who…
Righteous, Remorseful Jews
As my 61st birthday approaches, I’ve noticed that I have recently been going back to authors and works I read many years ago. For example, I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, William D. Miller’s…
Correspondents
Proximity by Martín Zaldivar Hi Mark, … The last two years have been rough. New York City can be a very lonely place, and I miss my good friends, as well as the calmness of…
Where the Tortured and the Torturer Shook Hands
How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here? —Lawrence Ferlinghetti I first read Seven Days…