Neil Pembroke in Worship sums up modernity, I think accurately and sadly: It was once the case that a biography was decided to a large extent by forms, structures, and values established by the timeless orders of tradition. A person was born into a particular class and into a particular religion, and consequently shaped her […]

My late friend Oratorian David Valtierra would tell a workshop crowd what a great mom and dad he had. He could not blame them at all when he screwed up. “Whatever I did wrong,” he would say, “I did on my own and I am solely responsible.” He had a great self image as any […]

October 7, 2001, the longest war that the US has ever fought began with our bombing of wide spread targets in Afghanistan. The freshmen at the university were 9 years old. The young soldiers fighting there  now  were ten or eleven. Imagine someone who was ten years old  in 1941 being sent off in 1951  to fight […]

A man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. Thoreau. Emerson. America. Today. If we are anything in secular terms, we are each tribes of one. Today I hear in the face of tragedy that even the best secular institutions have no markers, no rituals, no communal way to react to, confront, […]