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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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.
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
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
MORE
