“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here The pain ripped up the back of my left thigh at unexpected intervals. All the muscles of my body, feet to fingers, were tensed and had been so for miles. Then the sciatic nerve on the outside of my right thigh began to pulse, and though almost home, I slowed on the familiar back roads bracing myself for another sharp thrust. When I left the driver’s seat, I straightened my back and […]
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You Can Listen Here In 1964 I began to listen to Phillies’ games. I loved Bill Campbell’s home run calls. His voice and visits to Connie Mack stadium, the best of old hulks, gave me a boy’s green love of baseball. My father took me several times. We always sat on the third base side under the upper deck. My first time there I watched Dick Allen hit a triple off the Ballantine beer scoreboard in right center […]
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You Can Listen Here Issue by issue, deconstruct those musty stacks of National Geographic’s left in basements everywhere and you will find artists’ renderings of our ancestors, all of them hairy, stooped and eyes bright with potential. One illustration shows a troop of them on the edge of the rain forest about two million years ago. They are looking out over the savanna and its scattered Acacia trees, yellow grasses, enormous sky. Oh what to […]
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You Can Listen Here I think it’s been there since my Aunt Elsie read to me from the Book of the Martyrs. I have had an interest in the history, actions and personal psychology of tyrants and in the nature of evil, and early Catholicism may have been the stimulus. Raised Catholic, we received theological training beginning in first grade. At that age the instructional emphasis often fell on the reality of sin. It is […]
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