If you want to infuriate yourself over your morning coffee, read a couple of pages of Steven Brill’s article Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us in Time Magazine on the outrageous costs of healthcare in the United States. (h/t to Margaret Steinfels). The article follows the story of
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In deep middle age, a close friend of mine finds himself immersed in a love affair. I find myself a bit (just a bit) envious as I observe the white heat of his intimacy (which I don't use here in a sexual sense). How can I characterize this intimacy? The question of intimacy as such is
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The Mosque of Imam Hussein is one of Cairo’s holiest shrines. It contains the tomb of the Prophet’s grandson. It sits on a clean well lit little square next to the ancient bazaar.
My friend Ken and I were to meet the Ustez (Professor) near the entrance closest to Fishawi’s Coffee Shop
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The beating heart of the profit center of the little grocery store was the tiny ten foot square liquor department and Dan the Store Manager who understood human behavior.
One doesn't see them in Chicago anymore; the neighborhood chain grocery store large enough to have a meat department with
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Avik Roy is a conservative blogger on healthcare who is also an adviser to the Romney campaign and who by sheerest coincidence also wants to scare the bejeesus out of everyone about Obamacare, especially if they live in a swing state. In two articles (so far) covering Ohio and Wisconsin, Roy
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Now that the GOP has gone all serious on us about the economy, it is interesting to see a substantive criticism of Paul Ryan's economic policies (and record) by a significant figure on the Right. David Stockman was Reagan's Budget Director and one of the fathers of "supply side"
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I thought I had been a few places and seen a few things, but when the old Greek shopkeeper in Cairo put out the Spam and the canned baked beans on his dusty shelf, I thought I would burst into tears. For several hot months I had showed up at the Greek’s grocery at 4pm every Thursday looking for
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Without the least hint of irony, Avik Roy (a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and health-care advisor to Mitt Romney) has written an article for National Review called “How Obamacare Harms the Poor” (via subscription). The main thrust of his argument is that Obamacare (that is, the
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I have been in Cairo for about a month and I am now Mr. Bat. I have been named Mr. Bat by the Egyptians, who make fun of my name because there is no P sound in Arabic. Of course, most of the Egyptians I associate with can speak English perfectly well and can certainly pronounce the P sound. This is
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Economic law cannot possibly be contradicted by moral law. The moral law tells us what we ought to do. Economic law, on the other hand, is purely descriptive and necessarily amoral, having nothing to do with morality one way or another.
Thomas E Woods Jr. The Church and the Market – A
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Sad, powerful, poignant collection of Zippo lighters personalized by US soldiers in Viet Nam, that were recently sold at an auction. They speak for themselves
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Amerimex Auto (Se Habla Espanol) had a strict rule against drugs or alcohol on the premises. It was probably a sound enough policy because it helped increase productivity two or three percent. Cocaine addiction was so prevalent on the lot that it was viewed by most of the staff as an
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David Brooks wants to save your employer coverage by eliminating your employer coverage. In an article called A Choice, Not a Whine, David Brooks wants us to see that there is a plausible Republican alternative to Obamacare. He begins, of course, by softening up the opposition. "The case
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Bruce said:
I agree that this [providers marking up their prices double and triple digits and that part of what health insurance sells is discounts] is a big problem. In addition to preventing price discovery, it makes insurance a requirement even for those wealthy enough self-insure. I’d like
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Obamacare has passed the Constitution sniff test and we now live in a socialist Worker's Paradise. What about all those dead-beats who chose not to have insurance because of their pre-existing conditions? If it is bad for people to only buy insurance when they are sick, won't Obamacare come
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As a professed member of the Third Order Secular of the Franciscans, I know that we tend to have a reputation of being "liberal". Our current Rule, which was approved by Pope Paul VI in 1978, is definitely a post-Vatican II document. But we see our Rule in particular and Vatican II in
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If you ever go to a white working class bar in a red state, the juke box will be playing and the music coming out will be country and western. Different cultures in our big melting pot tend to promote their own music, and rural culture is no exception. And of course, music can tell us a great
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Are corporations not only people with free speech, but citizens with conscience protections? The USCCB makes its argument.
In the USCCB Administrative Committee’s March 12 statement (referred to in Grant Gallicho’s post), the bishops assert there are three classes of citizen relative to
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Jim Pawels remarks:
Unagidon – I don’t believe you’ve pegged Rick Santorum exactly right...
...I find Santorum’s embrace of Catholic social teaching, and his serious application of it to real world problems, to be intriguing and exciting. It seems he’s a very long shot to win the
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Republicans may call themselves “conservatives” but the core economic philosophy of the Republican Party is Neoliberalism. Each and every serious candidate in the Iowa primary subscribes to Neoliberalism, and this is one thing that makes it hard to choose between them. But each candidate has a
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To some people, Western European “socialism” looks like a nanny state where capitalist assets which should be private are redistributed widely through society in the form of a social safety net. Safety net implies charity; the holder of the net clearly cannot be in the same boat as those who
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From the statement of someone in the Vatican on economic inequality:
The 41-page text was titled, “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority.” Prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, it was released Oct.
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I don’t believe there is a Punitive Option for the Rich in Catholic Social Teaching. There is a Preferential Option for the Poor. If taxing the rich at some higher level will make things better for the poor, then I might feel more excited about the policy than I do, But I don’t believe it will
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My close friend died on August 30th of a liver cancer that came upon him so quickly that he didn’t have time to know his life was over. The cancer sat on a liver that he had destroyed in a slow suicide of almost 40 years of hard drinking and smoking. It was a suicide that I had watched and
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Today be National Talk Like a Pirate Day. And since me Somali be a bit rusty, I will do me best to imitate that immortal actor what's his name from the movie Treasure Island.
So riddle me this. All over this great continent of ours, white collar workers will be talkin' like pegged-legged
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I was awash in food at a wedding reception this weekend and it reminded me of an endless dinner I experienced in Munich once (in the Englisher Garten) of large whole chickens, mountains of sausages, and yard long steins of beer. I came away from that experience convinced that if Germany has a
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I stood in the front yard of the parish church on Ballinlough Road in Cork and watched the three of them in their dinner jackets making jokes and flipping their cigarette butts off the tombstones of the former pastors, making little explosions of bright ash, and I thought “Nothing good can come
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1. Any government intervention means the market has failed. Listening to right-wing and left-wing discussions about small versus big government, one can get the impression that either the free market represents the natural world and government is some sort of parasite, or government (in the form
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Here is a little film clip about two and a half minutes long, where Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich lays out our basic economic and political dilemma, using little cartoons.
Robert Reich: Artist and Scholar
Since the clip is from Moveon.org, which we know is at the very heart of
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Is depression a spiritual problem?
When my brother died suddenly in 2008, I was shocked and bereaved, but what I didn’t see at the time was that my state of mind had opened up a giant crack though which a deep depression slipped and built its nest. Feeling badly gave way to doing badly and
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When I went to the Midwestern university hospital to apply for a job as a wheelchair pusher to support my ABD lifestyle habit and instead they offered me the directorship of that department as well as of the Volunteer Service, I thought that I was either just lucky or I that looked good in a suit
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(Being a continuation of Part 1 and Part 2 of the story of Paul, a young boy living on the Irish West Side of Chicago during the Time of the Great Vatican Council.)
The following weekend found Paul still in a panic about what to do about the relic. At school that week he had been so
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A continuation of this story from last Friday.
The plan was for Paul to meet his friend Ed Doherty in front of the TNT Tap, which unlike most of the other taverns in the neighborhood was located in the middle of a residential side street next to a railroad viaduct. Ed was late, as usual, and
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I’ve made quite a study of conversion stories, written and oral, and I have to give Unagidon points for trying to express his religious experience.
But these types of narratives always defy the ability of language to convey what’s going on, so the experience sounds kind of vague and airy-
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Said Claire, about joining a religious order:
My comment in the last thread lined up possible reasons against joining that immediately come to mind. On the other hand, what would be reasons for joining? What difference does it make to be a secular Franciscan? Is it an alternative Christian
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If Italians were officially despised by 12 year old Paul’s Chicago Irish relatives, everyone in his family seemed to have at least one Italian best friend. His grandmother Jane had two. Olivetta (a spinster who had held onto her virginity to care for her mother until the old crone had died at the
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We are told that early in his career, St. Francis of Assisi presented us with some exhortations. These sum up what the Franciscan Order requires and are also a pretty good description of a Catholic life.
1. Love God
2. Love one’s neighbor
3. Turn away from sinful tendencies
4.
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What kind of commitment does your religious profession entail? Are you bound in obedience to the Provincial? Do you have to promise to yield to the local bishop’s authority? Did you commit to support the Franciscans financially even if there is no financial transparency? Aren’t you worried
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About three years ago my then four-year-old daughter developed a habit during Sunday Mass of needing to go to the bathroom just as the sermon started. I would take her down to the ladies room in the basement of the church and help her get through the very heavy door. There, she would spend a couple
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The gist of why capital should not be taxed, why capitalists should not be burdened by the costs of regulation, and why there should be no unions or minimum wages or medical benefit mandates to skew the market price of labor seems to be this. The more capital that is accumulated by capitalists,
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Once upon a time there was a man named Jones who made a killing on Wall Street during the dot.com bubble. Jones was not particularly intelligent and he was perhaps a bit timid for a capitalist, but he had been young and impetuous at the time and had taken a number of flyers on the stock market
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Years ago when I was in graduate school, there was another graduate student that I became so close to, we felt comfortable enough to put aside the political correctness of academia and have fierce, robust, and almost violent arguments about what we believed about political economy. We were
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Recently I wrote a blog post that mentioned that some people posit that humans have, in effect, two brains. We have a primitive “lizard brain” that reacts instantly to immediate danger. And we have a nice big rational brain, evolved later, that we use to make sense of the world. The
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Every year corporate CEOs spend literally billions of dollars on human resource consultants and airport bookstore management books trying to capture what I shall call the Unconquerable Nut. The Unconquerable Nut is that space in every working day made up of all the inefficiency, slackness,
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Despite the fact that the used car lot was a full fledged capitalist operation, one that by the Iron Laws of Capitalism could be deemed successful because it hadn’t failed yet, it couldn’t really be called a model of efficiency. Efficiency is about the effective management of time. But
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When we get to the part of the Mass where the priest says, “And free us from all anxieties,” I am sometimes distracted enough from my own anxieties to think “He must be talking about someone else; all of my anxieties are useful.”
Well maybe not every single one. But I have trouble
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One of the very great impediments to my own spiritual development is the delicious solace I take in believing that no matter what kind of sinner I am, there are far worse sinners out there. I would not be surprised to find that there is engraved on the stone threshold of Hell (where all the short
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At the used car lot, the dreaded high point of the week was the trip to the car auction to see what kind of pretty shells might have washed up on the beach recently. Everyone, even Ratso, was required to go, except for the Chung Brothers. We would also leave one man behind to watch the store
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There are a few streets in Chicago that are affectionately known to the working class locals as “raper’s row.” These are places one goes to get a used car when one is short on cash, credit, and hope. Places like this are the border towns of the capitalist miracle; where the national
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I have said before that I believe that the definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" are incoherent. It is not that they have no principles. It is that the principles they claim to have are often not principles at all. At the level of the specific things they claim to support
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A friend of mine who is a reporter and novelist, a Chicagoan who moved out West years ago, recently wrote to tell me that he had taken up his pen to record the real life story of a friend who is a clerical-sexual-abuse survivor. He sent me a draft of the first chapter. It is very graphic and
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I once knew someone whose rationality I respected in general, but who strongly held the belief that eating pork makes one stupid. To him it was simply a fact that the more pork one ate, the more stupid one became.
In this rational age, there are many who think the same thing about religion.
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What is to be found in this set of beads?
I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic, cost a dime, and was pink. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived at
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Most modern jobs have a bit of pointlessness to them from time to time. But the most pointless job I think I ever had was when I worked in the commodity (or derivatives) markets; two years as a trader and two years as a “Research and Risk Manager” for a commodity fund. As a trader I worked
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Metanoia. Literally repentance or penance. The term is regularly used in the Greek New Testament, especially in the Gospels and the preaching of the Apostles… It means a change of heart from sin to the practice of virtue. As conversion, it is fundamental to the teaching of Christ, was the first
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If you have a group of Catholics over for a dinner party, and they've stayed a bit too late but you don't want to be rude by pointedly winding the alarm clock in front of them, one thing that always works to clear the room is to bring up in conversation the efficacy of prayer and people's
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Th' nearest anny man comes to a con−ciption iv his own death is lyin' back in a comfortable coffin with his ears cocked f'r th' flatthrin' remarks iv th' mourners.---Finley Peter Dunne
Right now, at this very moment, a friend of mine is dying in a hospice far away in Ireland.
In my biological
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If you were to see me walk into a room and you reacted at all, you would likely think "White, middle-aged, businessman. Nice tie." My liberal friends tend to think I'm a liberal and my conservative friends tend to think I'm a conservative. But if a discussion really gets heated, and
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Ezra Klein is a liberal blogger who has made a name for himself as a sort of health care "policy wonk". In my own biased opinion, he has tended to focus almost exclusively on the evils of the insurance industry in creating our current rotten system. But yesterday, for the first time
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Recently in California the mother of a dead child organized a demonstration in front of her insurance company. The daughter had been deathly ill and one of her doctors had suggested that they try an organ transplant. The insurance company initially refused to cover this, since they considered
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