My family was not perfect in every way (no one’s is), but if they had done nothing else right, they acquitted themselves with great honor that day. If the powers that be at Penn State had half the sense of right and wrong, half the integrity that my family had shown forty years earlier, there would be several, maybe dozens, of young men today who would not now be struggling with demons whose acquaintance I fortunately never made.
Previous I Read The News Today Entry | Next I Read The News Today Entry Net Worthlessness: Congressional Wealth and the Unstable Right A recent report by Peter Whoriskey in the Washington Post on the rising wealth of members of Congress contained a number of surprises, and some food for thought. That Congressmen and -women […]
For the funeral, his daughters put together a tape of short excerpts from songs the man had loved. We were freed up to love him again in a way that would not have been possible without this aid. Damn straight we were celebrating his life! Do I think God felt slighted or envious? Do I think God was worried we were focusing our attention in the wrong place? Uh, nooo.
Neither Richard Blumenthal nor any of the rest of us, be we combat vets, reservists, war protesters, or draft dodgers, should be ashamed to speak from our experiences of the Vietnam War. Everyone has something valuable to share.
Let us concede that the paper trail stops one or two levels shy of Ratzinger in many of these cases, though not of Rev. Kiesle. What is required is for the Church to release all documents. And even if Benedict has grown, letters like the one shielding Kiesle can only be expiated by Benedict leaving the hierarchy now.
It is grotesque for perpetrators to put themselves on the same moral plane as victims of any sort, let alone victims of one of the greatest wrongs ever committed.
If those who teach us about God are to dispel our reasonably doubts, they must be visibly and consistently honest and reliable. Someone who has participated in a coverup of criminal activity simply cannot command our trust that way.
What then do we observe about Jesus’ example? Why, he’s the guy who gets taken to task for dining with sinners.
Do we really want to fight a whole large nationalist movement (however hateful) just to stop a separate small (if historically effective) terrorist front?
Next I Read The News Entry Seems Like Old Times in Afghanistan They say that President Obama is meeting with platoons of advisors to determine whether and if so how to carry on that conflict. To those of us old enough to remember Vietnam, it all seems eerily familiar. Take one Democratic president, elected with […]