Houses and Graves

No one else on the FDR home tour was about to wet herself with excitement like I was. He sat in this room! That was his lamp! He pulled himself up this dumbwaiter! (He did– even long after electricity, both to keep himself in shape and to assure himself he could evacuate in case of fire.) Inside the house is neat– but you have to stay with your tour guide to make sure no one spits on the floor. Outside the house is even better.

Annotated Bibliography: Inevitable Crime, Gifts of the Mediocre, and Stepping up for Jesus

Since… there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with society and not with the individual criminal. “It is society that prepares the crime and … the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,” is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People […]

Satan’s Favorite Holidays

I’m a person who relies on ritual and routine to contain the worst excesses of my personality. And thus I am always rather undone by holidays without ritual. I always look forward to Labor Day weekend and Memorial Day weekend, and New Year’s Day, but when they get here, I have no idea what to […]

The Word

St. John declares that words make us human. That words, even, make us exist. It is words, and not pictograms or tools or logic or emotions. And so St. John is the patron saint of writers. I mean St. John the Evangelist, theoretical author of what is known as John’s gospel. I don’t know or […]