Posted in Essays, reality check on Oct. 15, 2010 by hweidner
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 […]
Posted in Essays, reality check on Oct. 11, 2010 by hweidner
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 […]
Posted in Essays, reality check on Oct. 7, 2010 by hweidner
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 […]
Posted in Essays, reality check on Oct. 1, 2010 by hweidner
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, […]